Government human rights commissioner hopes lessons will be learned from fabricated attack

The government’s human rights commissioner Monika Šimůnková says the fabricated attack on a Moravian boy by Roma was damaging to the Roma community and those who work with stopping social exclusion. She said she hoped the incident would be a permanent reminder to locals of how cautiously people should approach media information and warned against blaming groups of people for the acts of individuals. Residents of Břeclav took to the streets en masse when a fifteen-year-old boy reported he had been beaten by three Roma. He was hospitalised and lost a kidney. On Thursday he admitted to police that he had in fact fallen off one balcony railing on to another and had invented the story for his mother.