Czech police said yesterday they had released David Duke, former leader of US extremist group the Ku Klux Klan, and ordered him to leave the Czech Republic by midnight.
On Friday, police charged Duke with the hate crime of supporting and promoting movements suppressing human rights.
Duke had planned to give talks this weekend in the capital as well as in the country’s second-largest city of Brno. He is visiting the Czech Republic at the invitation of local neo-Nazis to publicize the translation of his 1998 memoir, My Awakening.
Contrary to earlier statements, the state attorney yesterday decided against asking the court to keep Duke in custody, police spokesman Jan Mikulovsky said.
While police could have held Duke for 48 hours without court’s consent, they decided to release him as he had already been questioned, the spokesman said. Upon release, the Czech Republic’s immigration police ordered him to depart the country yesterday.
Police said they charged Duke for allegedly denying the Holocaust in a translated book he had come to promote.
“In his book he is promoting views that show signs of denying the Holocaust,” Mikulovsky said.
Denying that the systematic mass murder of Jews and other minorities by Nazi Germany took place is a hate crime in the Czech Republic punishable by up to three years in prison.
Earlier this week, Prague’s Charles University banned a lecture by Duke for a class on extremism. The university said it canceled it out of a fear that it could have been attended by neo-Nazis.
Political activities of Czech far-right groups have been on a rise in recent months, including provocative marches through Roma ghettos.
Duke, 58, is a white supremacist and a supporter of racial segregation. Aside from being a former chief of the Ku Klux Klan, he had served as a lawmaker in the Louisiana’s House of Representative and unsuccessfully ran for US president.
MONEY GRAB: People were rushing to collect bills scattered on the ground after the plane transporting money crashed, which an official said hindered rescue efforts A cargo plane carrying money on Friday crashed near Bolivia’s capital, damaging about a dozen vehicles on highway, scattering bills on the ground and leaving at least 15 people dead and others injured, an official said. Bolivian Minister of Defense Marcelo Salinas said the Hercules C-130 plane was transporting newly printed Bolivian currency when it “landed and veered off the runway” at an airport in El Alto, a city adjacent to La Paz, before ending up in a nearby field. Firefighters managed to put out the flames that engulfed the aircraft. Fire chief Pavel Tovar said at least 15 people died, but
LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER: By showing Ju-ae’s ability to handle a weapon, the photos ‘suggest she is indeed receiving training as a successor,’ an academic said North Korea on Saturday released a rare image of leader Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter firing a rifle at a shooting range, adding to speculation that she is being groomed as his successor. Kim’s daughter, Ju-ae, has long been seen as the next in line to rule the secretive, nuclear-armed state, and took part in a string of recent high-profile outings, including last week’s military parade marking the closing stages of North Korea’s key party congress. Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a photo of Ju-ae shooting a rifle at an outdoor shooting range, peering through a rifle scope
South Korea would soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps does not work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers. The approval was made “on the condition that strict security requirements are met,” the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said. The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday said he did not take his security for granted, after he was evacuated from his residence for several hours following a bomb threat sent to a Chinese dance group. Albanese was evacuated from his Canberra residence late on Tuesday following the threat, and returned a few hours later after nothing suspicious was found. The bomb scare was among several e-mails threatening Albanese sent to a representative of Shen Yun, a classical Chinese dance troupe banned in China that is due to perform in Australia this month, a spokesperson for the group said in a statement. The e-mail
RSS