Police and prosecutors don't doubt the authenticity of Turek's scandalous posts, but the case is closed due to statute of limitations

The case involving hateful posts by MP Filip Turek has been definitively closed, though this doesn't mean the politician didn't write them. Prague 4 district prosecutor Jan Vychyta announced this on Monday, stressing that neither the police nor the prosecutor's office had any doubts about the authenticity of the posts.

"The authorities conducting the pre-trial proceedings considered the authenticity of the publications to be sufficiently proven, at the very least, for the purposes of initiating criminal prosecution," the prosecutor's office said in an official statement. Had the case gone to trial, Turek could have contested his authorship — for instance, by claiming, as he has previously hinted, that someone used his phone to write racist and hateful comments without his knowledge.

Supporters of the Motorists movement had earlier tried to dispute Turek's authorship of a comment about the 2009 arson attack on a Roma family in Vítkov, in which he allegedly wrote that "burning a Gypsy woman is a mitigating circumstance."

According to prosecutor Vychyta, some of the posts on Turek's page were assessed as potentially containing elements of several so-called hate crimes. However, he clarified that authorship of the posts alone does not prove that a crime was committed — only a court could rule on guilt, and the MP would have had the opportunity there to challenge the authenticity of the posts.

The problem is that all the posts under investigation are more than five years old, meaning any crimes the MP might have committed have already fallen under the statute of limitations. "For this reason, the pre-trial authorities cannot initiate criminal prosecution," Vychyta explained.

Police had been examining a series of deleted Turek posts, first flagged by the outlet Deník N, since October of last year. Some of them were deemed potentially to meet the criteria of several sections of the Criminal Code. In the end, the case was closed in late June precisely because the statute of limitations had expired.

The MP's posts drew interest beyond just the police. It was because of them that President Petr Pavel refused to appoint Turek to a ministerial post, as he informed Prime Minister Andrej Babiš in writing at the beginning of January. Besides praising Nazi Germany, the president noted that Turek had questioned the equality of men and women as well as of various minorities, and had downplayed the severity of violent hate crimes.

Shortly afterward, Turek announced he would file a lawsuit against the president for violation of personal rights. However, more than six months later, he confirmed to the outlet Novinky that he had changed his mind about taking it to court.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz