On Wednesday evening, a real drama unfolded on Jakusevečka Street in Zagreb when a dozen men got into a fight in the street. They did not even pay attention to whether anyone was nearby and used slats and stones without thinking of the possibility of endangering others in the vicinity, including a child who was there with them. According to Croatian media reports, the asylum seekers fought and hit each other in other people’s backyards. The increasing number of violent acts by migrants at home and elsewhere is a cause of great fear among the local population.
“It all escalated with a fight, people fighting with slats in the yard where children were playing, throwing stones,” an eyewitness, a resident of Dugave in Novi Zagreb, described the incident to the media outlet Zagreb.info. According to another media outlet, Jutarnji.hr, the fight took place between a dozen middle-aged and younger men. Croatian media report that a fight broke out between asylum seekers, who ended up at the police station and in a hospital after police intervention. What is even more frightening is that this is not an isolated case.
The Zagreb police received a report of a fight on Wednesday at around 8:05 p.m., and upon arrival at the scene, they found several foreign nationals, applicants for international protection in Croatia, fighting. In addition to noise and swearing, wooden slats and stones were being used in the fight, and three asylum seekers ended up in the hospital KBC Rebro, where they were found to be lightly injured, writes Jutarnji.hr.
The Zagreb police told Croatian media that six people were brought to the official police premises for a criminal investigation. They were brought to the competent misdemeanour court on suspicion of committing an offence under Article 6 of the Act on Offences against Public Order and Peace, on the basis of an indictment. A 30-year-old man, one of the three injured men, suffered a head injury as a result of being hit by a wooden slat. Police officers have identified the man in question as a 25-year-old foreign national. The man has been arrested and is under criminal investigation on suspicion of committing the offence of attempting to cause grievous bodily harm.
The residents are worried about themselves and their children
The residents of Dugave are outraged by the conflict. They are not interested in the reasons for it, they just want peace and security where they live. Various images of a group of men fighting, throwing objects at each other, and the broken head of one of them, who is being helped by Dugave residents to stop the bleeding, and then the residents waiting with him for the police to arrive, have flooded the social networks. What is even more horrifying is the fact that the clash took place next to the construction site of a future primary school and in the immediate vicinity of the Porin Hotel, where the international protection applicants have been staying for many years. Several residents of Dugave state that this fight was not an isolated case and point out that every now and then, the tenants of the hotel in question find themselves in some kind of trouble or breaking the law, and they also involve others in their misdemeanours, wrote the media outlet Jutarnji.hr.
Tanja Brkić
