Czech sentenced for murder in Ireland

A Czech national was sentenced to life in prison in Ireland July 20 after he pleaded guilty to the murder of fellow Czech national Nicola Vonková, 19.

Jakub Fidler, 24, pleaded guilty at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin to the charge of murdering the victim at an unknown time between July 20 and 21, 2008.

The Czech pair first met in the Czech Republic while working together at a Tesco store. They had been living in Galway, Ireland.

On the night of July 20, 2008, the pair argued over e-mail access, and Vonková was later murdered.

At the sentencing, a neighbor of Fidler told the court he called the Irish police July 21, 2008, to say he was in Fidler's home in Iverin, Galway, and that he was making the call at the request of Fidler, who wished to hand himself in.

Upon arriving at the scene, the police found Fidler in an emotional state. He directed them to a drainage canal, where the police discovered Vonková's body lying face down. The cause of death was asphyxiation due to manual strangulation.

Superintendent Noel Kelly, senior investigative officer of the case for the Irish police, told the court that, prior to this phone call, Fidler had made a number of communications via Internet to his mother back home in the Czech Republic implicating himself in the murder.

At the sentencing, the victim's mother, who traveled from the Czech Republic, said her daughter had lost the chance to be an aunt and that her nephew would only know her through photographs.

"I am a mother who survived her child," she said. "This is a situation no mother is prepared for."

She also described her daughter as "extremely self-sacrificing" and someone with a "strong social sentiment." Vonková had fought for animal rights and organized the sponsorship of children's charities in the Czech Republic. Even in Ireland, she kept up her sense of social responsibility by taking care of the disabled.

At the sentencing, Fidler expressed remorse for what he had done. His representative, John Gallagher, spoke on Fidler's behalf, expressing his "deep, abiding regret."

Fidler had first come to Ireland to carry out landscaping work. He had no previous convictions in either the Czech Republic or Ireland.

Marie Foglová, consular officer at the Czech Embassy in Dublin, said there are currently 10,000-12,000 Czech citizens living in Ireland. When questioned about the possibility of Fidler being moved to a Czech prison to see out his sentence, she responded, "It is just too soon to say right now, but the possibility certainly exists."

Jan Beneš, a spokesman at the Czech Foreign Affairs Ministry, said the ministry would be monitoring the case and would be prepared to provide Fidler with consulting services should he seek extradition to a Czech prison.

However, these consultancy services and transport costs would have to be covered by Fidler himself.

"If a person demands transport to his homeland, the average cost is 100,000-150,000 Kč," Beneš said.

This is the second case of a Czech national being sentenced to life imprisonment in Ireland in the past two years. In January 2008, David Brožovský was sentenced for the rape and murder of a mother of two children in Longford, Ireland.

In 2009, 623 Czechs were imprisoned abroad. Of these, 103 were jailed because of drug offenses.

- Filip Šenk and Klára Jiřičná contributed to this report.

Cillian O'Donoghue can be reached at
codonoghue@praguepost.com