The plaintiff sent a border guard colonel from the Czechoslovakian era to court

The public prosecutor has indicted the former Deputy Chief of the Border Guard, Jan Muzikář, due to the injuries and deaths of several people while trying to cross the Czechoslovak border during the communist regime. They accuse him of abusing the authority of an official. This was reported by Czech Television and the iRozhlas server, which refers to the lawyer of the survivors, Lubomír Müller.

The musician faces up to ten years in prison. The indictment itself was filed by public prosecutor Katarína Kandová on Tuesday, April 2, at the District Court for Prague 1. The police proposed the indictment already in January of this year. The plaintiff granted the proposal after an expert examination, which dealt with whether Muzikář’s health and mental state allows him to understand the meaning of criminal prosecution. According to iRozhlas, the expert found no obstacles to Muzikář’s prosecution, according to the report.

The musician was born in 1934 and joined the Border Guard in 1955. From 1980 to 1989, he served as chief of staff and first deputy chief of the Main Administration of the Border Guard and State Border Protection. In doing so, he “demanded from his subordinate members of the border guard flawless performance of state border protection even at the cost of using the most extreme means”, iRozhlas quotes from police documents.

In 1963, the musician received a badge for the protection of the borders of the Czechoslovak Republic and in 1976 an award for meritorious protection of the state borders of the Czechoslovak Republic.

For crimes on the Czechoslovak border, the police officers from the Office of Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism wanted to bring other representatives of the communist regime to justice. However, no one has yet been tried – former Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Miloš Jakeš and former Minister of the Interior and Prime Minister Lubomír Štrougal died during the prosecution, former Minister of the Interior Vratislav Vajnar then died as a defendant.