PRAGUE - A man set himself on fire in a
central Prague square on Friday as Czechs marked the 50th
anniversary of a student's self-immolation in protest at the
Soviet invasion that crushed the Prague Spring.
The unidentified man was taken to hospital after bystanders
doused the flames that enveloped him in the same spot at the
elevated top of historic Wenceslas Square where Jan Palach set
himself ablaze in January 1969.
Palach's suicide was a desperate act aimed at lifting the
apathy hanging over the country in the wake of the Soviet
intervention in August 1968 in which Soviet tanks and troops
occupied Prague, snuffing out the Prague Spring process of
democratic reforms to the Communist system.
"According to initial information, a man born in 1964 poured
an inflammable liquid on his body and set himself on fire,"
Prague police said on their Twitter feed. An investigation was
under way.
Paramedics put the man, who suffered burns over 30 percent
of his body, into an induced coma before taking him to hospital,
the Prague emergency service said.
There was no immediate word on the man's motives.
"I saw him from the distance, and rushed in as I realised,
'My God, he really is on fire'," said a young woman at the scene
next to the National Museum at the head of Wenceslas Square.
"I started to put out the fire, tried to douse it. He had
petrol on himself, you can still smell it," she told reporters.