Man held over bus stabbings of two Ukrainians in Warsaw
Police say the suspect attacked the pair in mid-October and hid for days in a wooded area before being caught.
By Rebecca Foster ·
Polish police detained a 30-year-old man last weekend in a wooded area of Bielany after he allegedly stabbed two Ukrainian passengers on a city bus in Warsaw in mid-October. The suspect fled before officers reached the scene.
The two victims were hospitalized with stab and slash wounds. Investigators determined the attack was driven by the victims' ethnicity, according to a press release from Żoliborz district police reported by European Pravda.
After identifying the man, police tracked his movements and found him living in the woods. He was placed in a cell at a police station, and prosecutors filed three charges against him, two of them covering the stabbings of the Ukrainian citizens with an ethnic motivation.
The charges stem from offenses committed while he was a repeat offender, within five years of completing at least six months of a sentence imposed for a similar intentional offense. He served that term intermittently from April 2021 to February 2023, under a sentence from the Warsaw-Żoliborz District Court. The offenses carry prison terms of three to 20 years, and a court ordered the man held in pre-trial detention for three months at prosecutors' request.
Earlier this year, three Polish men stood trial in Radom over the beating of a Ukrainian citizen. In Kraków, a 39-year-old man berated a Ukrainian couple, and in Gdańsk, a man attacked a Ukrainian passer-by along with two Polish residents, calling them Banderites.
