More than 50 human rights organizations have remembered on Thursday in the streets of Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava, the victims of a shooting at an LGTBI pub that claimed the lives of at least three people.
The owner of the Teplaren pub where the shooting occurred in October has explained during the rally that they have been warning about increasing violence against the LGTBI community for years. «We have done everything in our power to prevent it from happening, to oppose the systematic efforts of a large part of society that wants to erase us from the public space,» he said.
The attack, which took place on October 13 in the afternoon, was carried out by a 19-year-old identified as Juraj K and who was found lifeless near the headquarters of the Ministry of Education after committing suicide, as reported by the Police.
Two of the deceased were in front of a pub, whose owners described it as a bar «close to the gay community in the center of Bratislava». Shortly after the attack, the perpetrator of the shooting confessed to the crime and, according to initial investigations, took his own life.
Human rights organizations subsequently requested that the two people killed not be referred to as men because one of the victims did not identify himself as either a man or a woman. Since then, hate crimes against the LGTBI community have increased in the capital.
Following the pub attack in Bratislava, another event shocked the country when two men were insulted and physically assaulted in broad daylight in a bar next to a luxury hotel for kissing in public, according to media reports.
This was in addition to a beating of a young man who was brutally beaten in Slovakia’s southeastern regional capital Nitra for kissing another young man on a bench. He suffered fractures and facial injuries so severe that he had to undergo surgery in hospital.
