Self-immolation

last updated 8 January 2015

Prague

A young man doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square last week, in a gruesome suicide that copied a famous Cold War protest. In 1969, 22-year-old Jan Palach killed himself in that way and on that site to protest the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. But last week’s self-immolation, by 19-year-old Zdenek Adamec, appeared to be motivated more by personal depression. “I am another victim of the so-called democratic system, where not the people decide, but money and power,” Adamec said in a note left at the scene. “All my life I encountered problems I was unable to cope with. I cannot go on.” Horrified passersby threw their coats over the burning boy to smother the flames, but he died at the scene.