Photo montage courtesy LRT

Lithuania media are reporting a case against alleged neo-Nazi terrorist Gediminas Beržinskas went to court June 17. The case concerns his placing a homemade bomb outside a Western Union office in Vilnius and leaving neo-Nazi graffiti on the wall next to the bomb back on October 6, 2019. The bomb was quickly diffused by Lithuanian law enforcement bomb experts and the suspect was traced and arrested on October 15, 2019, despite trying to disguise himself from video cameras during the attempted bombing. Police and prosecutors are refusing to say why they hid the crime so long and are claiming at the same time there are no other suspects in the case and the accused acted alone.

Beržinskas allegedly used spray paint to write “FK Division,” “Siege” and to paint a swastika at the crime scene. Police and prosecutors say FK means “Feuerkrieg Division,” a now mostly-defunct group of right-wing neo-Nazi extremists who targeted Jews and others they considered non-white. Lithuanian police say their ideology was based on the book “Siege” by American neo-Nazi James Mason. According to police, Beržinskas’s bomb was functional and would have exploded with a force equivalent to 2.5 kilograms of TNT.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community believes police should have given some indication earlier of imminent terrorist activities against Jews in Vilnius in order to take better security precautions, security which the Community pays for out of its own pocket. We also wonder why other incidents of neo-Nazi activity including vandalism and graffiti aren’t investigated with even a fraction of the same enthusiasm shown when a foreign financial institution is involved.