Police on Tuesday arrested former Polish minister of the interior Mariusz Kaminski and former deputy minister of the interior Maciej Wasik, who had taken refuge in the palace of Polish President Andrzej Duda, in an escalation of a standoff between the new and previous governments.
Duda welcomed the members of the former ruling party into the presidential palace as police went to their homes to arrest them.
Polish media reported that the men were arrested inside the palace.
Photo: Reuters
Warsaw police gave no details, saying only that the arrest was “in accordance with the court order.”
The events escalated a dispute between the new government, led by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and the Law and Justice Party, which governed Poland for eight years until last month following its defeat in a general election in October.
Duda is closely aligned with Law and Justice and is making it clear that he will oppose Tusk’s agenda.
Duda’s second and final term runs until the middle of 2025.
Tusk accused the president of going along with actions by Law and Justice to create chaos and instability after its electoral defeat, saying that Duda “must stop this spectacle, which is leading to a very dangerous situation.”
The prime minister said that the president was obstructing justice by giving the wanted men refuge.
At a news conference, he read out a section of the penal code that he alleged Duda had contravened, which carries a prison term from three months to five years.
“I just want the president to be aware of what his political friends have tricked him into,” Tusk said.
Kaminski and Wasik came out of the palace briefly to speak to journalists hours before their arrest.
“We are not hiding,” Kaminski said. “We are currently with the president of the Republic of Poland until evil loses.”
Kaminski and Wasik were convicted of abuse of power for actions taken in 2007, when they served in an earlier Law and Justice-led government.
Duda in 2015 pardoned them.
In June, Poland’s Supreme Court overturned the pardons and ordered a retrial.
Kaminski and Wasik were sentenced last month to two years in prison.
A court on Monday issued orders for police to arrest them and deliver them to prison.
They insist that they are innocent, and Duda said that the pardons remain valid.
On Tuesday, Duda invited Kaminski and Wasik to his palace for a ceremony where he appointed two officials who had worked for them as his new advisers.
His office posted a photograph of him posing with all four.
Earilier in the day, parliamentary speaker Szymon Holownia postponed a planned session of the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, which had been scheduled to start yesterday, until next week.
Kaminski and Wasik, who were re-elected as lawmakers in October, had said they wanted to take part in the session, even though Holownia and others insist that their guilty sentences strip them of their parliamentary mandates.
Holownia said the situation had created a “deep constitutional crisis ... that does not guarantee that the Sejm’s deliberations this week would be peaceful.”
Kaminski is a former head of the Central Anticorruption Bureau who was convicted along with Wasik and two others of abusing their power for creating a provocation in a sting operation seeking to frame their targets.
That scandal contributed to the collapse of Law and Justice’s first government in 2007.
Tusk’s allies welcomed the arrests, saying they marked a return to officials being held accountable.
“Let this be a warning to politicians for the next generation,” Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Radek Sikorski wrote on social media.
Former Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki was among Law and Justice officials who voiced outrage, describing the arrested men as “political prisoners.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS