Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Polish Secret service files found in private homes

The Internal Security Agency has searched 11 homes looking for top-secret files regarding the liquidation in 2006 of the Polish military counterintelligence agency, the WSI.

Secret documents were found in three of the homes searched yesterday', the spokesperson of the General Prosecutor's Office said on Wednesday.

Later, Prosecutor Robert Majewski revealed to the press that as many as 11 homes had been combed in the search for the top-secret files in question, the Dziennik daily reports.

Investigators are demanding that at least two out of the four homeowners in question be arrested.

Piotr Baczek, press officer to the former WSI liquidator, Antoni Macierewicz, was one of the persons on the Security Agency's list.

'They were looking for some secret files but I did not have any', Baczek told RMF FM radio Wednesday morning.

Baczek also said that internal security agents had informed him that the search was connected to allegations of attempts to sell the annex of the top secret report on WSI's liquidation, written by Macierewicz, to the publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza daily, Agora.

Baczek admitted that several documents were found in his flat regarding the operations of the former military services, but the top-secret annex was not among them.

When asked if it was true that some journalists had been shown the annex and offered to buy it for 250,000 zlotys, Baczek suggested that the action could be part of a deliberate stung operation in order to frame members of the WSI Liquidation Committee, headed by Macierewicz.

The prosecution summoned Piotr Baczek for questioning Wednesday afternoon but no charges were made and he was released after the interrogation, writes the Dziennik web site.

The daily speculates whether the secret files may have been found in the homes of another WSI liquidator, Leszek Pietrzak, former officer in the Communist intelligence services Aleksander Lichocki (who allegedly offered the report to the daily for money) and Polish TV journalist Wojciech Sumlinski.

Lichocki and Sumlinski were arrested yesterday on corruption charges. Both are pleading not guilty.

The WSI was dissolved by the previous government in October 2006 due to, what they alleged, were illegal activities by many of the agents. The 400 page report alleges that agents were involved in a cabal including organized crime members, journalists and politicians sympathetic with post-communist forces in Poland.
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