Czech government wants to strengthen the measures against unknown individuals who have sent envelopes with toxic content to two ministries and a TV-channel.
Czech citizens will be presented with a manual indicating how to protect themselves before danger parcels. Because of the threat, the minister of Interior Milan Chovanec has convened a crisis staff session on Friday 28th November.
„I don’t want to spread panic that the citizens of the Czech Republic are in danger,“ Chovanec said. „They aren’t. But we will present a manual to them to know how these parcels are alike. And we don’t see any reason why this manual should not be published on the web.“
In cooperation with other state security forces, the Czech police is prosecuting all the cases when suspicious parcels have been sent to public institutions or individuals. Chovanec believes that the perpetrators will be captured soon. He has revealed that the Czech police had been investigating, in the last eight years, at least four thousand cases of suspicious letters or parcels‘ shipment .
Nevertheless, only two of them have contained dangerous chemicals. This was the case of the letter addressed to Chovanec himself and of another one sent to the finance minister Andrej Babiš.
Last Tuesday, several Czech media have received e-mails from the alleged offenders pretending that in the letter to Babiš, there has been a mercury chloride, and that Chovanec received a parcel with bromine cyanide.
„Every suspicious letter or parcel that has been received by the public institution is immediately sent to the firemen department and then to the special laboratory,“ Chovanec stressed. „We can’t know if there is a flour or something else.“
The experts in toxicology warn that to produce dangerous chemicals is rather easy. The Czech police is investigating all the recent cases.
The perpetrators could be punished by up to eight years of imprisonment. The last parcel with a suspicious content has been sent to the Interior ministry on Friday. According to preliminary reports, there were no toxic chemicals in it.
