Word: popieluszko
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...regime of General Wojciech , Jaruzelski. A week earlier, four Interior Ministry officials had been sentenced by a Toruan court to jail terms ranging from 14 to 25 years for their role in the abduction and murder last October of a pro-Solidarity Roman Catholic priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko. The trial discredited the state security apparatus and suggested the possibility of a plot by Communist hard- liners against Jaruzelski's leadership. As a result, the authorities seemed more intent than ever on containing their opponents...
...target is the overwhelmingly popular Roman Catholic Church. Said Religious Affairs Minister Adam Lopatka: "The authorities' error was that Popieluszko was not imprisoned long ago." Henceforth, Lopatka said, any priest who "deserves it will certainly be arrested." Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban suggested that a dozen priests had made statements worthy of investigation...
...remorse but relief, for he could have fared much worse: the state prosecutor had requested the death penalty. Also sentenced to long terms for aiding Piotrowski in the abduction and killing of Popieluszko last October were two subordinates in the security forces, Leszek Pekala and Waldemar Chmielewski. Pekala, who drove the kidnap car, received 15 years, and Chmielewski, whose stuttering, tear-filled testimony gave the trial some of its most dramatic moments, got 14 years. Adam Pietruszka, the former colonel who flatly denied Piotrowski's accusations that he had encouraged the killing, received a 25-year jail term...
...drew a distinction between Pietruszka and Piotrowski, whom he described as the decision makers, and their subordinates. Kujawa explained that he chose not to order Piotrowski hanged because Polish law states that punishment should seek to educate and frighten the criminal, not simply avenge the crime. Indeed, lawyers representing Popieluszko's family and his driver, Waldemar Chrostowski, at the trial had mentioned the priest's personal opposition to capital punishment. On the day the verdicts were announced, Popieluszko's relatives were not even in court; they had said earlier that they were interested not in the penalties but only...
...murder of Popieluszko, a popular and fervent supporter of the banned Solidarity labor union, and the subsequent arrest of the four Polish security officers, had presented the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski with its most formidable challenge since martial law was imposed in 1981. Jaruzelski's decision to prosecute the men publicly offered fellow Poles an unprecedented glimpse into the workings of the country's secret police and defused, at least temporarily, the explosive anger over Popieluszko's death. There is speculation that the murder was engineered by government hard-liners to embarrass Jaruzelski and his Interior Minister, General Czeslaw...