Polish WWII leader laid to rest for third time
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Poland's World War II leader has been laid to rest for the third time after being exhumed for an autopsy amid rumours that his 1943 air-crash death was the result of Soviet foul play.
General Wladyslaw Sikorski's coffin, draped in Poland's red and white flag, was escorted on a gun carriage to Krakow's Wawel Castle by serving soldiers and aging veterans.
An hour-long televised mass was held before the coffin was returned to its sarcophagus in the crypt, where many Polish icons lie.
General Sikorski, often compared to France's wartime General Charles de Gaulle, led a London-based government-in-exile set up after the Nazi German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.
He died aged 62 on July 4, 1943 when a British Royal Air Force plane crashed into the sea seconds after take-off from Gibraltar, a territory governed by London.
The Czech pilot, the sole survivor of 17 people aboard, told an RAF inquiry days later that his controls jammed, and the inquiry was unable to establish why, according to declassified records.
Many Poles are convinced the crash was no accident.
Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, or IPN, which was founded in 1998 to investigate historical crimes, launched a probe in September.
Available documents and wartime tensions with Moscow lend credence to the theory that General Sikorski was killed on Soviet orders, it said.
A number of factors have fuelled conspiracy theories including the presence of a Soviet diplomatic plane in Gibraltar on July 4, two other incidents involving aircraft carrying General Sikorski and the fact that the head of British intelligence in the region was Kim Philby, who was later exposed as a Soviet mole.
In addition, many war-era British archives remain classified - although conspiracy sceptics caution they may not contain anything about General Sikorski.
"We're going to try to get documents from the Russian archives and once again ask the British officially to confirm whether all the related documents have been declassified," IPN chief Janusz Kurtyka said.
On Tuesday (local time), experts had exhumed General Sikorski before holding an autopsy at a criminal forensics laboratory. The results are due in a month.
"What was found differs significantly from what Canning found," said IPN prosecutor Ewa Koj, referring to RAF medical officer Daniel Canning who examined the victims in 1943. She declined to elaborate.
Mr Canning had testified that the bodies "showed head injuries and multiple injuries, the degree of violence in my opinion suggesting that the time of death approximated to the time of the accident".
Critics of the probe question how the autopsy could help end the speculation, and Ms Koj acknowledged it would not reveal if the crash was an assassination.
After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, General Sikorski's government found itself on Moscow's side and he signed a treaty with his erstwhile foe to free hundreds of thousands of Polish POWs into an exile army.
But the Soviets broke ties with General Sikorski in 1943 when he demanded an inquiry into the "Katyn" massacre of thousand of others captured in 1939. Moscow blamed the Nazis for the killings, and only admitted them as the Soviet Union collapsed five decades later.
Moscow created a Polish communist government and put it in power in 1944 as the Red Army drove out the Nazis.
General Sikorski's death also robbed his government of authority in the West, making it easier for London and Washington in November 1943 to recognise the Soviet seizure of pre-war Polish territory, keeping relations in the anti-Nazi camp on an even keel.
General Sikorski was first buried at a Polish military cemetery in England. He was a pariah in communist Poland, and his body was only moved to Krakow in 1993, four years after the regime's demise.
- AFP
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