The results of the three-year cold-case probe were announced by Poland’s Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Zbigniew Ziobro on Tuesday, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
‘Another victim of the communist system’
Ziobro spoke to reporters in Warsaw alongside Karol Nawrocki, the chairman of the state-run Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) and prosecutors from the IPN’s investigative arm, called the Chief Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation.
The justice minister said: “The investigation has established beyond any doubt that Fr. Blachnicki was murdered. He was poisoned.”
Ziobro added: “The collected evidence and new statements from witnesses allow us to conclude that Fr. Blachnicki became another victim of the communist system.”
'Deadly toxic substances'
IPN prosecutor Andrzej Pozorski said: “The investigation has determined beyond any doubt that Fr. Franciszek Blachnicki’s death, which took place on February 27, 1987, was the result of murder, through the provision of deadly toxic substances.”
Pozorski added that much of the evidence had to be collected abroad and the probe spanned Poland, Austria, Germany and Hungary.
Prosecutors exhumed Blachnicki’s remains, interviewed witnesses and consulted experts in forensic medicine, anthropology, toxicology, genetics and medical analytics, Pozorski said.
He specified that prosecutors spoke to people “with knowledge of this event [Blachnicki’s death], who had not been interviewed before,” and “some of whom live abroad.”
Pozorski said the probe benefited greatly from international legal assistance, including under the European Union’s European Investigation Order, which enabled Polish prosecutors “to obtain archival evidence from Austria and Hungary,” Polish state news agency PAP reported.
Fr. Franciszek Blachnicki
Born in 1921 in the southern city of Rybnik, Franciszek Blachnicki fought in the Polish Army against the 1939 Nazi German invasion of Poland.
He was later sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then to a jail in Katowice and sentenced to death, before being pardoned and spending the rest of the war in German concentration camps and prisons.
It was while awaiting the death penalty that Blachnicki converted to Catholicism and became a priest after the war.
He went on to create the so-called Light-Life Movement, also known as the Oasis Movement, an influential Catholic renewal organisation that is now active in more than 30 countries.
Following the imposition of martial law by Poland’s communist authorities in 1981, Blachnicki settled in the western German municipality of Carlsberg.
In 1983, Poland’s Soviet-controlled authorities issued an arrest warrant, accusing the priest of “acting against the interests of the Polish People’s Republic.”
They also sent agents to spy on Blachnicki, and two of them, a married couple named Jolanta and Andrzej Gontarczyk, managed to befriend the priest.
It was after a meeting with them that Blachnicki died suddenly on February 27, 1987, with the cause of death officially classified as “pulmonary embolism.”
The suspicious circumstances of Blachnicki’s death led the IPN to launch a cold-case investigation, whose findings were announced on Tuesday.
Blachnicki was posthumously awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, a high Polish state distinction. In 1995, the Catholic Church launched the process of his beatification, the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP, ipn.gov.pl