The medieval Orloj clock in Prague on the Town Hall tower symbolically stopped for 13 minutes today in memory of the 148 victims of speeding, risky driving in the Czech Republic last year.
Today, when the Czech Republic celebrates National Day without rushing, the government session began 13 minutes late, and the Sparta-Plzen football match and many other events will be delayed by the same amount.
Those 13 minutes of delay are a symbolic message that this is the only time a driver "saved" on average on the highway from Prague to Brno if he drives 20 kilometers per hour faster than the speed limit.
The aim of the campaign is to warn that there are almost no situations in which it is worth risking your life due to speeding, and speeding is responsible for 15 percent of all traffic accidents in the Czech Republic, and as many as 36 percent of those in which someone died.
This year, the People's Day without Haste is being celebrated in the midst of the scandal involving Filip Turek, an MEP and honorary president of the marginal radical right-wing party "Motorists for Themselves", who recently boasted on social media of a photo showing him holding the steering wheel with one hand while driving 238 kilometers per hour, allegedly in Germany where this is allowed.
Activists from the Manipulators project, however, quickly determined that Turek was not taking the picture in Germany, but in the Czech Republic, near Plzen, and journalists recalled that he had already boasted on social media, while he was only popular as a car racing competitor, that he had driven at a speed of 325 kilometers per hour near Ostrava in the eastern Czech Republic.
The MEP initially denied that the picture was from the Czech Republic and threatened people who discovered where he had exceeded the speed limit by double, calling them liars and disinformers, but he boasted that he regularly drives 250 kilometers per hour in Germany.
Only when Czech rescuers published a picture of a traffic accident in which a young man crashed into a tree while driving too fast and died, along with a message to Turek's supporters not to follow their idol because they would end up like him, did Turek appeal to Czechs to stop setting their own speed records and posting them on social media, following his example.
The investigation was led by the Czech police, and Turek is threatened with losing his driver's license because a lawyer from Brno has begun collecting evidence to file criminal charges against the MEP.
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