Historians from Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), the body charged with investigating communist crimes, have found documents that suggest that the Soviet Union was involved in the kidnap, torture and murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko in 1984.The IPN says new evidence indicated that Father Popieluszko, an unflinching and brazen critic of communist rule in Poland, may have been held at a Soviet military base near Kazun, 30 miles to the north of Warsaw, and murdered a number of days after his abduction.
Professor Jan Zaryn, a historian at the IPN, said that the order to kill the priest may well have come from a Kremlin worried by the growing anti-communist influence of Poland's Catholic Church and its Polish head, Pope John Paul II. By murdering the priest, Moscow may well have wanted to deliver a blunt message to the Church as a way of forcing it to stay out of politics.
The new evidence undermines the official version of events surrounding the death of Father Popieluszko, who had become a leading protagonist of the suppressed Solidarity movement and major thorn in the flesh of the country's socialist regime at the time of his death.
According to the conventional line, Father Popieluszko was abducted on the night of October 19, 1984 by three men from Poland's internal security service, the SB, and, operating under their own initiative, they beat him to death.
Eleven days later the priest's body was pulled from a reservoir to the north-west of Warsaw. An estimated 250,000 Poles, appalled by the murder, attended his funeral in Warsaw a few days later.
Despite suspicions that the order came from high up in the communist hierarchy, until now there has been little evidence to suggest anything other than the official line that the SB agents, who were convicted of the murder in 1985, were responsible for the killing.
But a report in the Polish newspaper Polska, based on the IPN documents, said that the injuries sustained by the priest's body were so severe that they could not have been committed by the SB agents alone.
Professor Zaryn has also alleged that the trial of the agents was an exercise in damage limitation, designed to keep the possible involvement of high ranking politicians, including that of Poland's then leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, secret.
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(Source: TCUK)