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Monday, 23 February 2009 |
A Roma man and his five-year old son were shot dead in a village southeast of Budapest during a fire which engulfed their home on Monday, the criminal department head of Pest County police said, quoting the result of an autopsy.
The national police headquarters offered 10 million forints (EUR 33,300) in reward for any information on the murder.
Hungarian MEP of Roma origin Viktoria Mohacsi, referring to eyewitness accounts, said that the man and the child were shot when attempting to escape from the burning house.
The house in Tatarszentgyorgy was set alight by a petrol bomb, said Orban Kolompar, head of the National Gypsy Authority (OCO).
Mohacsi, of the opposition liberal Free Democrats party, said that she had been alerted by family members because they felt the police had been reluctant to treat the case as a murder.
A police spokeswoman earlier told MTI that spent cartridges had been found in the courtyard of the house.
The man's two other children suffered serious burns.
Florian Farkas, chair of the Roma organisation Lungo Drom which has struck an alliance with the main opposition Fidesz party, said that the incident in Tatarszentgyorgy demonstrated a lack of public safety in Hungary and the inability of police and the government to act. "Unless a solution is found for the integration of the Roma, there will be a civil war situation in Hungary, " he added.
Kolompar said inciting hatred against the Roma by certain media and politicians were responsible for the incident. He called on the 800,000 Roma living in Hungary to join forces in order to recover peace and warned that violence must not be allowed to escalate.
Kolompar said the circumstances of the double murder in Tatarszentgyorgy showed many similarities to an attack that took place in Nagycsecs in northeast Hungary in November last year which claimed the lives of two Roma.
Ombudsman in charge of minority affairs Erno Kallai called for resolute political steps without delay to "rescue peace in society." He said that there were more than a dozen attacks with Molotov cocktails and weapons against Roma over the past 12 months but none of the perpetrators have been found.
Anti-Roma sentiments aggravated in recent weeks after a much-publicized stabbing attack, allegedly committed by Roma at a nightclub in Veszprem in western Hungary, in which a Romanian handball player was killed and his Croatian and Serb team members were seriously injured.
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