Wojciech Jaruzelski personally ordered a plane, flown by a man escaping communist Poland to defect to Austria, be shot down in 1975.
The plane exploded over Czechoslovakia on 16 July 1975. The pilot, 36-year old Dionizy Bielański, was trying to escape from communist Poland to Austria. He was killed when his plane was fired at by a Czechoslovakian jet fighter. The plane wreckage was found just eight kilometers from the Austrian border.
Communist authorities tried to cover up the killing, calling it “an accident.”
The Institute of Public Remembrance (IPN), however, says it has discovered documents which confirm, beyond reasonable doubt, that the order to shoot the plane out of the sky came from General Wojciech Jaruzelski when he was Minister of National Defense.
'The document was found in the Wrocław archives. It is a note written by the officer on duty at the local militia headquarters,” says Łukasz Kamiński of the Institute of National Remembrance.
“He recorded information received from Krakow, which said that a Polish plane was shot down over Czechoslovakia at the personal order of Defense Minister Jaruzelski. It is the first written document from our archive that confirms information which we obtained from witnesses. An investigation is underway, and this will surely be an important piece of evidence,” he said.
The circumstances of the incident remain vague but the note clearly shows who gave the order, thinks historian Wojciech Roszkowski. “It was equal to shooting people who attempted to run away from Eastern Germany through the Berlin Wall - which is a crime,” said Roszkowski. (jn/pg)