(Bloomberg) -- More than 20 people were detained after an attack on participants and police at the first LGBT pride parade in Bialystok in eastern Poland.
Four of the people detained are suspected of offences including threatening police officers and assault, a spokesman for the regional police headquarters told Bloomberg on Sunday. Surveillance-camera footage is being used to identify further suspects, he said.
Some of the 800 pride participants were spat on and kicked, footage in the local media showed. Police were also attacked with bottles and stones and one officer was wounded. Offenders will be punished, Interior Minister Elzbieta Witek said in a twitter post on Sunday.
Gay rights are a polarizing issue in Poland before fall general elections. The ruling Law & Justice Party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has warned that the advancement of gay rights is a “grave danger” for family life and the future of the European Union, underscoring a departure from the EU's liberal, multicultural mainstream.
Kaczynski's supporters have embraced his message, with about 30 cities, mostly in the former communist country's poorer eastern regions, adopting declarations saying they're “free from LGBT ideology” and opposing “social engineering that's foreign to Polish culture and natural order.” The pro-government Gazeta Polska weekly is now planning to distribute “LGBT-free zone” stickers to its readers.
To contact the reporter on this story: Marek Strzelecki in Warsaw at mstrzelecki1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, James Amott
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