Hungarian camerawoman sentenced for tripping migrants as they fled police

Michael Howie13 January 2017

A Hungarian camerawoman has been sentenced to three years’ probation for kicking and tripping migrants fleeing police near the border with Serbia.

Petra Laszlo was fired from her job at television station N1TV after video footage spread online appearing to show her kicking a girl and a young man in September 2015.

She was handed the sentence by a court in the town of Szeged late last night.

Laszlo was found guilty of disorderly conduct after a hearing in which she testified by video-link.

Petra Laszlo was fired from her job over the footage from September 2015

Judge Illes Nanasi said Laszlo’s behaviour “ran counter to societal norms” and said the facts of the case did not support her self-defence claim.

Prosecutors had previously said there were no grounds to charge Laszlo with a racially-motivated hate crime.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa passed through the Balkans and Hungary in 2015 en route to western Europe.

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