WARSAW: Warsaw authorities detained a teen-ager on Wednesday after a historic synagogue in Poland’s capital was hit by a bottle containing a flammable substance, police said, in an incident that prompted condemnation from Polish political leaders.
“Police officers... in cooperation with the Internal Security Agency (ABW), detained a 16-year-old man, a Polish citizen, in connection with the incident that took place last night on the premises of the synagogue,” police said in a post on social media platform X.
Nobody was hurt in the incident, which took place around 1 a.m. (2300 GMT on Tuesday), Poland’s chief rabbi Michael Schudrich told Reuters earlier.
Jewish community officials said security camera footage appeared to show that three Molotov cocktails were thrown within a matter of seconds although it was not clear if one or more assailants were involved.
“We were informed overnight about an incident involving a bottle containing a flammable liquid being thrown onto synagogue grounds,” a police spokesperson said earlier on Wednesday.
Attacks against Jews and Jewish targets have risen worldwide since war erupted in Gaza last October following an attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants and Israel’s subsequent military offensive.
The Warsaw incident left soot marks around a ground-floor window of the synagogue as well as a burned area on the grass below.
“Look there,” Schudrich told reporters at a news conference at the synagogue, pointing at the burn marks on the building.
“If it (the bottle) had gone 15 centimeters to the left it would have reached the window and possibly inside the synagogue. There’s a library there.”
“Here there’s no context, there’s no other possibility — it’s antisemitism,” he added when asked about a possible motive.
Israel’s ambassador to Poland, Yacov Livne, said the synagogue was the only one in Warsaw to have survived World War Two and the Holocaust.
“Outrageous antisemitic attacks such as this cannot be tolerated today. The perpetrators must be found and punished,” Livne wrote on X.
Polish President Andrzej Duda called the attack “shameful.” “There is no place for anti-Semitism in Poland! There is no place for hatred in Poland!” he said on X.
Presidential cabinet member Wojciech Kolarski was quoted by the PAP news agency as saying that the president had reacted “immediately and unambiguously” to the news as “it is in the interest of many of Poland’s enemies to show Poland in a bad light.”
“The attack on the Nozyk Synagogue in Warsaw is a very simple way of building an image of a Poland that does not exist, but which our enemies can easily replicate in the international media,” Kolarski was quoted as saying.
Suspect detained after Polish synagogue escapes major damage in firebomb attack
https://arab.news/wypbg
Suspect detained after Polish synagogue escapes major damage in firebomb attack
- Police officers in cooperation with the Internal Security Agency (ABW), detained a 16-year-old man, a Polish citizen, in connection with the incident
- Attacks against Jews and Jewish targets have risen worldwide since war erupted in Gaza last October following an attack on Israel by Hamas-led militants
A month on, flood-struck Aceh still reels from worst disaster since 2004 tsunami
- Aceh accounts for almost half of death toll in Sumatra floods that struck in November
- Over 450,000 remain displaced as of Friday, as governor extended state of emergency
JAKARTA: Four weeks since floodwaters and torrents of mud swept across Aceh province, villages are still overwhelmed with debris while communities remain inundated, forced to rely on each other to speed up recovery efforts.
The deadly floods and landslides, triggered by extreme weather linked to Cyclone Senyar, hit the provinces of North Sumatra, West Sumatra and Aceh in late November.
Aceh, the westernmost province of Indonesia, was the worst-hit. Accounting for almost half of the 1,137 death toll, a month later more than 450,000 people are still unable to return to their homes, as many struggle to access clean water, food, electricity and medical supplies.
“We saw how people resorted to using polluted river water for their needs,” Ira Hadiati, Aceh coordinator for the Medical Emergency Rescue Committee, or MER-C, told Arab News on Friday.
Many evacuation shelters were also lacking toilets and washing facilities, while household waste was “piling up on people’s lawns,” she added.
In many regions, people’s basic needs “were still unmet,” said Annisa Zulkarnain, a volunteer with Aceh-based youth empowerment organization Svara.
“Residents end up helping each other and that’s still nowhere near enough, and even with volunteers there are still some limitations,” she told Arab News.
Volunteers and aid workers in Aceh have grown frustrated with the central government’s response, which many have criticized as slow and ineffective.
And Jakarta continues to ignore persistent calls to declare the Sumatra floods a national disaster, which would unlock emergency funds and help streamline relief efforts.
“It seems like there’s a gap between the people and the government, where the government is saying that funds and resources have been mobilized … but the fact on the ground shows that even to fix the bridges, it’s been ordinary people working together,” Zulkarnain said.
After spending the past two weeks visiting some of the worst-affected areas, she said that the government “really need to speed up” their recovery efforts.
Aceh Gov. Muzakir Manaf extended the province’s state of emergency for another two weeks starting Friday, while several district governments have declared themselves incapable of managing the disasters.
Entire villages were wiped out by the disastrous floods, which have also damaged more than 115,000 houses across Aceh, along with 141 health facilities, 49 bridges, and over 1,300 schools.
The widespread damage to roads and infrastructure continue to isolate many communities, with residents traveling for hours on foot or with motorbikes in search of basic supplies.
“Even today, some areas are still inundated by thick mud and there are remote locations still cut off because the bridges collapsed. For access, off-road vehicles are still required or we would use small wooden boats to cross rivers,” Al Fadhil, director of Geutanyoe Foundation, told Arab News.
“From our perspective, disaster management this time around is much worse compared to how it was when the 2004 tsunami happened.”
When the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami struck in 2004, Aceh was the hardest-hit of all, with the disasters killing almost 170,000 people in the province.
But MER-C’s Hadiati said that the impact of the November floods and landslides is “more extensive and far worse than the tsunami,” as 18 Acehnese cities and regencies have been affected — about twice more than in the 2004 disaster.
As Friday marks 21 years since the cataclysmic tsunami, Fadhil said the current disaster management was “disorganized,” and lacked leadership and coordination from the central government, factors that played a crucial role after 2004.
“The provincial and district governments in Aceh, they’ve now done all they could with what they have,” he said.
“But their efforts stand against the fact that there’s no entry of foreign aid, no outside support, and a central government insisting they are capable.”
