Police in Warsaw have arrested a 30-year-old man suspected of stabbing two Ukrainian citizens on a city bus in an attack investigators determined was motivated by the victims' ethnicity. The arrest was announced in a statement from police in the city's Żoliborz district, reported by European Pravda.
The attack took place in mid-October. According to police, the assailant used a knife against the two passengers, leaving both with multiple stab wounds and cuts. The victims were taken to hospital, while the attacker escaped from the scene before officers arrived. Investigators subsequently established that the victims had been targeted because of their ethnicity.
Officers quickly identified the man they suspected of carrying out the stabbing. Their investigation led them to a wooded area in Bielany, where they found that the suspect had been living while in hiding. Police detained him there last weekend, following the attack earlier in the month.
After his arrest, the man was brought to a police station and placed in a cell. Prosecutors reviewed the evidence gathered in the investigation and filed three charges against him. Two of those charges relate to the attack on the Ukrainian citizens and its ethnic motivation.
Police said the alleged offences were committed under repeat-offender circumstances. The man had previously served at least six months in prison for a similar intentional offence, and the new offences fell within five years of that imprisonment. The earlier sentence had been handed down by the Warsaw-Żoliborz District Court.
He served that sentence in separate periods between April 2021 and February 2023. The offences in the current case carry prison terms ranging from three to 20 years. Following a request from prosecutors, a court ordered the suspect to remain in pre-trial detention for three months.
The case follows other reported incidents involving Ukrainian citizens in Poland. In August, three Polish men went on trial over the brutal beating of a Ukrainian citizen in Radom. In another incident in Kraków, a 39-year-old man verbally abused a Ukrainian couple.
In Gdańsk, a man attacked a Ukrainian passer-by and two Polish residents, calling them “Banderites.” The pejorative term comes from the name of Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera and is widely used in Russian propaganda to label Ukrainians or supporters of Ukrainian statehood.
