BBC News
Published
image copyrightGetty Images
image captionTwo of the Czechoslovak crew shown here - Karel Valach (1st left) and Vilem Konstacky (4th from left) - died in the June raid
Dutch salvage workers have found some bone fragments and scraps of airmen s clothing in the debris of an RAF Wellington bomber shot down over the Netherlands in June 1941.
The Wellington had a six-man Czech crew, five of whom died. It was downed by a German night fighter, crashing at Nieuwe Niedorp, a village about 60km (37 miles) north of Amsterdam.
It had been bombing the port of Bremen.
The dig is part of a wider Dutch project to find wartime crews remains.
Czechs vaccinated in the US with a vaccine officially recognised by the European Medicines Agency have been shocked to find out that their vaccine certificates are not recognised by their home country, Czech Radio’s flagship station Radiožurnál reported on Wednesday.
To pass the bureaucratic hurdle, some Czechs have had to resort to asking for another two vaccine doses in Czechia. According to sources in the report, members of the Health Ministry and of one of the diplomatic offices in Amercia have informally recommended that the affected do so. However, this has not been confirmed officially by the Health Ministry.
Jailed Belarusian Pratasevich Dogged By Claims He Fought For Azov Battalion In Ukraine
June 09, 2021 15:14 GMT
Share
share
Raman Pratasevich s life has been turned upside down fast.
On May 23, months after he left Belarus to avoid prosecution on incitement charges he said were trumped-up by Alyaksandr Lukashenka s government, the journalist and blogger was arrested, along with his girlfriend, after their Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius was diverted to Minsk following what is widely believed to have been a
behind civil disturbances, an offense punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
Informally, by Belarusian state media and others, he has been accused of fighting in the war in eastern Ukraine with the Azov Battalion, a nationalist force with neo-Nazi roots that has played a prominent role in the conflict that erupted as Kremlin-backed separatists seized parts of the Donbas in 2014.
The Czech Foreign Ministry has issued a statement denouncing the practices of the Lukashenko regime against political opponents.
The statement described Thursday s television appearance by the detained Belarusian opposition journalist Raman Pratasevich as forced and apparently manipulated. It is unbelievable that in the 21st century, the Lukashenko regime uses the same repressive methods against its opponents as those of the brutal Stalinist regime in the 1950s the statement says.
The Czech Foreign Ministry has called for the immediate release of Raman Pratasevich and all other political prisoners in Belarus.
The matter is expected to be high on the agenda of talks between Czech top officials and Belarussian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya during her visit to the Czech Republic next week.