Did six vehicles filled with riot police monitor the Czech interior minister's town hall meeting with dissenters in the northeastern Czech city of Karvina on January 22, 2024? No, that's not true: Both a police spokesperson and the woman who took the photograph of a policeman in tactical gear that was included in the video confirmed to Lead Stories that the image was taken under different circumstances and in a different city.
The claim appeared in a video on TikTok on January 23, 2024 (archived here). The caption above the image (translated from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff) read:
[Interior Minister] Vitek [Rakusan] and his friends arrived to debate in a friendly manner and without CENSORSHIP in Karvina. How does that quote go, help me: The one whose life is the least valuable fears for his life the most... There are six vehicles filled with riot police... So they are not missing in Prague, like the last time.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Feb 7 14:17:25 2024 UTC)
The text suggests that Interior Minister Vit Rakusan is afraid of meeting members of the public who disagree with his political agenda. The post, shared on social media platforms including TikTok, features an image of a policeman in tactical gear holding a rifle. The post originally appeared on this Facebook profile (archived here) and has since been removed.
A Google Lens reverse image search (archived here) revealed that the photograph was initially captured by Vera Vargova. When contacted by Lead Stories via telephone, Vargova confirmed that she took the picture on January 22, 2024, at her workplace, a pizza stand near a Kaufland store in the northeastern Czech city of Cesky Tesin, 15 kilometers (nine miles) south of Karvina. Vargova told Lead Stories:
There was one policeman who came to the stand and asked whether we heard any gunshots.
She said she had sent the picture to her neighbor, who then shared it in Cesky Tesin's public Facebook group (archived here).
In an email to Lead Stories, police spokeswoman Sona Stetinska confirmed that the policeman in the image was deployed on January 22, 2024, in response to a shooting threat targeting a supermarket chain in the towns of Cesky Tesin and Karvina. She said the suspect was apprehended and transported to a mental health facility.
A Google search (archived here) revealed that Karvinsky a havirovsky denik, a local newspaper (archived here), reported on January 22, 2024, that police conducted operations at Kaufland supermarkets in Cesky Tesin and Karvina in response to an unspecified anonymous threat. Additionally, Cesky Tesin informed the public on its Facebook page (archived here) about the threat and increased police presence near two supermarket chain stores in Cesky Tesin and Karvina.
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