Word: popieluszko
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...security precautions seemed grimly ironic, considering the fact that the four men who were brought to trial in handcuffs last week were, like the policemen outside, employees of the Ministry of the Interior. The four, all secret policemen, are charged in the plot to abduct and murder Father Jerzy Popieluszko, 37, a Roman Catholic priest who was an outspoken supporter of the banned Solidarity trade union. His bound and beaten body was discovered last October in a reservoir 85 miles north of Warsaw...
According to the indictment, Secret Police Captain Grzegorz Piotrowski, 33, the suspected ringleader, allegedly recruited two lieutenants from the security forces, Leszek Pekala, 32, and Waldemar Chmielewski, 29, to silence Popieluszko. The officers believed that they would be protected by their superiors. Pekala claimed in court that "one of the deputy ministers--I do not know which one--spoke of interrupting Popieluszko's activities." The action, he said, was "to take place outside the law." The prosecution named Secret Police Colonel Adam Pietruszka, 47, as the man who gave the orders; he pleaded innocent to the accusation that he aided...
...conspirators apparently devised three different plans against Popieluszko, ranging from harassment and torture to murder. Pekala also revealed that the priest almost escaped his captors when they stopped in a hotel parking...
Jerzy Urban, the government's press spokesman, gave a few new details of the Popieluszko autopsy report last week. He said that the priest died from strangulation rather than from any injuries he sustained in a beating and was dead when his body was tossed into a reservoir 90 miles northwest of Warsaw. Earlier reports had said that Popieluszko might still have been alive when he was thrown into the water. Urban also confirmed that the four police officers arrested in the case will go on trial soon and that the proceedings will be open to the foreign press...
...month since Popieluszko was buried, his tomb in the graveyard of Warsaw's St. Stanislaw Kostka church has been turned into a makeshift shrine, decked with wreaths and Solidarity banners. Early last week more than 30,000 Poles jammed streets surrounding the church to hear the monthly "Mass for the Fatherland" that Popieluszko began shortly before the imposition of martial law. The parish priest at St. Stanislaw Kostka, Father Teofil Bogucki, delivered a tough homily charging that 40 years after the imposition of Communism in Poland, "society is paralyzed with terror and people are worn out by hopelessness...