Kicking migrants does not make for good television. Just ask one Hungarian TV station that was taken off the air after their camerawoman kicked and tripped migrants who were fleeing from the police. As of Friday evening the TV station is still off the air.
The website for the TV station blames hackers for the outage.
N1TV, also called Nemzeti TV, claimed in a Facebook post that hackers from a Turkish internet address had deleted their entire website, including the archives and correspondence of the station.
The station’s editor-in-chief Szabolcs Kisberk said that the Tunsian Muslim hacker group called Fallaga Team was responsible for the attack. The Fallaga Team has been linked to information security attacks in the past, but there is currently no evidence that they are involved in this particular case.
Former camerawoman and migrant-kicker Petra Laszlo had written an open letter of apology, expressing that she regrets her panic-driven behavior. Laszlo has since been fired from the right-wing news station. Multiple videos feature Laszlo kicking a girl and tripping a man carrying a child while hundreds of immigrants run away from police. The act occurred on Hungary’s southern border that it shares with Serbia.
Laszlo claims she was panicked as the immigrants began running toward her, and she was only trying to protect herself.
Laszlo said in her letter, “I honestly regret what happened. I am practically in shock from what I did, and what was done to me. I am not a heartless, racist camerawoman who would kick children. I am a woman, a mother of small children, who has since lost her job, and who made a bad decision in a panic.”
The government of Hungary has adopted a tough stance on the flow of immigrants across its borders. The immigrants are typically attempting to reach Western Europe. Hungary describes the immigrants as a threat the prosperity of Europe and Christianity. So far this year, over 170,000 migrants have entered Hungary. Many of these migrants are refugees from the conflict in Syria.
Hungarian police have been attempting to collect the immigrants in order to register them, as per European Union rules. However, the migrants often refuse because they fear that they will be forced to remain in Hungary rather than traveling to Germany or Sweden.
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