Hilsner affair

The affair achieved widespread media publicity at the time, and Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, then professor at Charles University in Prague also got involved in the case to defend Leopold Hilsner.

Nearby was a pool of blood, some blood-stained stones, parts of her garments, and a rope with which she had been either strangled to death or dragged, after the murder, to the place where the body was found.

The only physical evidence against him was a pair of trousers on which some stains were found, which chemical experts said might have been blood, while the garment was wet as if an attempt had been made to wash it.

One witness against him claimed to have seen Hilsner, at a distance of 2,000 feet (610 m), in company with two strange Jews, on the day on which the murder was supposed to have been committed and on the spot where the body was found.

The prominent Czech nationalist scholar Tomáš Masaryk, professor of the Charles University in Prague, intervened on behalf of Hilsner; he filed an appeal to the supreme court, citing technical errors in the trial.

On 20 September 1899, a few days after the first trial, Hilsner was confronted by hostile fellow prisoners, who showed him some carpenters working in the courtyard of the jail and told him that they were constructing a gallows for him.

Hilsner was found guilty of having murdered both Anežka Hrůzová and Marie Klímová and sentenced to death on 14 November 1900.

The sentence was commuted by Emperor Franz Josef to life imprisonment on 11 June 1901 but requests to renew the trial were turned down.

A tombstone unveiled over his grave reads: 'As the innocent victim of lies of ritual murder, he languished in prison for 19 years'.