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A Czech politician hiding amid allegations of a Russian murder plot says he believes the threat against him is credible and he fears for his life.
Three Prague politicians are under 24-hour police surveillance due to the alleged plot to poison them, claims categorically denied by Moscow.
“It is very difficult,” said Ondrej Kolar, mayor of the sixth district of Prague, speaking to the BBC from an undisclosed location under a strong police guard.
“I haven’t seen my children in a long time, and they haven’t seen me. Even my family doesn’t know where I am,” he told me via Skype, which is now his only means of communication with the outside world. .
Symbolic statue removal
I know vaguely Mr. Kolar. We both worked once at New York University in Prague.
Its shiny blue cardboard background, with the words “Prague Municipal District 6”, was familiar to him. Then I remembered it.
The last time we met was shortly before a vote in the Prague 6 district council to move a 1980 bronze statue of Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev.
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EPA
The statue of Marshal Konev was removed on April 3 during the shutdown.
The World War II commander certainly liberated much of Czechoslovakia from the Nazis, but historians agree that he was not, as the statue’s plinth once claimed, the “liberator of Prague.”
Konev was a controversial figure who oversaw the Soviets’ brutal crackdown on the 1956 Hungarian uprising and helped crush the 1968 Prague spring.
The Russian government has reacted angrily to the removal of the monument and has even threatened legal action.
Mayor Kolar was leading the council meeting and I had to wait. I sat in an antechamber, under a large bright blue screen. He had apparently taken the screen to his undisclosed hideout.
“There are things I cannot comment on. But what I can say is that both the Czech police and the secret service have some information that there could be a threat directly from the Russian side,” he told me.
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AFP
President Putin is passionate about honoring Soviet war sacrifices.
Echoes from a spy novel
The nature of that threat, first clarified in a brief but explosive piece in the Czech investigative weekly Respekt, comes directly from a spy novel.
Three weeks ago, the publication claimed, citing unidentified intelligence sources, a man traveling with a Russian diplomatic passport arrived at Prague airport with a suitcase containing the poisonous castor bean.
According to the report, he was picked up by a car with Russian diplomatic plates and taken to the Russian embassy, not far from Ondrej Kolar’s office in Prague 6.
Czech intelligence services, Respekt said, viewed the man as a direct threat to two city politicians who had angered Moscow in recent months: Ondrej Kolar and Zdenek Hrib, the mayor of the capital.
Hrib recently oversaw the name change of the area in front of the Russian embassy as Boris Nemtsov Square, honoring a prominent opponent of President Vladimir Putin assassinated in 2015.
The next day, another publication, Denik N, claimed that a third Moscow critic, local mayor Pavel Novotny, was also receiving police protection.
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fake pictures
The Russian embassy changed its address to avoid associating with Boris Nemtsov
Officials with tight lips
Russia’s denials were swift and unequivocal. The report, the embassy said, “had absolutely no basis.” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, dismissed the news report as “false.”
There was also no confirmation or much in the way of comments from the Czech authorities.
A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told the BBC that “they would not comment on the leaks published in the media,” although she confirmed that an accredited Russian diplomat had arrived at the airport, presumably on one of the few flights still running during the blockade. of the coronavirus.
As astonishing accusations flashed across the world, sparking a mix of outrage, disbelief, and ridicule, journalists and diplomats began working their phones. There was, is, persistent skepticism, even among experienced Russian observers.
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fake pictures
Mayor Hrib says he is now also under 24-hour police protection
Assassinating the mayor of a European capital would amount to an act of war. It would be so counterproductive to the Kremlin that it would be just crazy.
And yet.
From a source within the Czech counterintelligence, there was no … exact confirmation. But far from being a negation. The media reports, the source told me, were based on objective information.
Ondrej Kolar is taking no chances.
“We know what happened in the past with the Russian Secret Service and its agents trying to poison Skripal with a nerve agent,” he told the BBC.
- Russian Spy: What Happened to the Skripals?
Former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned in Salisbury in 2018, by agents believed to have been sent by Russian intelligence.
“When they have the guts to do this in the UK, why not do it in Prague?”
