Municipal police officer assaulted Prague woman by the Vltava in 2025

In Prague, a municipal police officer punched entrepreneur Zdenka Zemanová in the face — a woman who had fed swans by the Vltava almost every evening for fifteen years. The incident took place on the evening of 6 February 2025 on the Smíchov embankment: the woman had a tooth broken and was handcuffed, while criminal proceedings against the officer only began a year later, in March 2026.

Fifteen years of caring for the swans

Zemanová, who owns a catering business, drove to the Vltava every evening at sunset, bringing food for the waterfowl in a green container — grass in summer, pellets, bread or vegetables in winter. It all began fifteen years ago with two rescued cygnets, and over time, in winter, between two hundred and three hundred swans would be waiting for her by the bank. The birds recognised her car and her whistle, and Praguers nicknamed her the "swan mother". "At that point you don't watch TV, you don't go to the theatre, you don't go to concerts — you don't go anywhere at all. You just look after them," Zemanová said, describing how caring for the birds gradually came to take up a large part of her life.

When the flock of swans moved from the railway bridge to the Smíchov embankment, the woman began having conflicts with people from a nearby rowing club, who repeatedly called the municipal police on her. However, until 6 February 2025, every check had ended without any serious incident.

"A huge blow to the face"

That evening, in the dark and cold, shortly after nine p.m., a municipal police car stopped behind Zemanová on the embankment. The officers switched on the siren, the swans scattered, and an argument broke out between the woman and one of the officers, who demanded her documents. Zemanová first gave her details verbally, and when they could not be verified, she decided to go to her car to fetch her documents.

According to her, when she picked up the container to leave, the officer rushed at her, tore the container out of her hands and threw it to the ground. When the woman asked why he was doing that, she was struck: "I took a huge blow to the face. A punch," Zemanová recalls. She ended up on the ground, without her glasses, her hands cuffed behind her back, her face in the mud, while the second officer, she says, merely stood and watched. The officers called the Czech police and reported that they themselves had been attacked.

Already at the scene, Zemanová realised one of her front teeth was broken. "Look, I'm missing a tooth," she told one of the arriving police officers, and was told in response: "But that's not my problem." That same evening, the woman wrote to Prague's mayor, Bohuslav Svoboda, about the officers' assault, underwent a medical examination and turned to attorney Michaela Dobrovičová.

A criminal case that dragged on for a year

The lawyer gathered photographs of the injuries and medical reports, commissioned an assessment of her client's credibility as a witness, and filed a police report — all the more so since the incident had taken place right in front of the municipal police car, which was fitted with a camera. She had expected that, given a clear-cut excess by a specific officer, the system would quickly investigate and draw conclusions. That did not happen.

The case split into two parts. The actions of the state police officers who arrived at the scene were twice shelved by the General Inspectorate of Security Forces, and twice returned to it by the senior public prosecutor's office after complaints. The actions of the municipal officers themselves were initially assessed by the prosecutor as no more than an administrative offence, but the municipal (city) prosecutor's office concluded that the case could not be closed that way and, because of the delays, took it away from the previous prosecutor. Meanwhile, the Prague municipal police's own inspectorate had already, just a week after the incident, reached a reasonable suspicion that the officer might have committed a crime, and referred the case to the Czech police. Criminal proceedings against the officer were only opened in March 2026 — more than a year after the incident.

Swans have begun disappearing from the Vltava

Less than three months after the assault on the embankment, something strange began happening by the Vltava: swans started disappearing from places where dozens of them used to gather. How this might be connected to the story of the "swan mother" is now being investigated by the journalistic inquiry that brought the details of the Smíchov embankment incident to public attention.

Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz