Colonel Denies Cover-up in Priest Slaying

The Polish secret police colonel accused of instigating the murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko and then trying to cover up the crime testified Friday that he withheld information from investigators because it seemed inconceivable that his officers were involved.

Col. Adam Pietruszka, commanding officer of the three agents who have admitted killing the popular, pro-Solidarity priest, repeatedly denied under questioning that he took part in a cover-up during the two weeks between the slaying and his arrest.

He has accused a subordinate, Capt. Grzegorz Piotrowski, of organizing the priest’s killing on his own initiative. Piotrowski, however, contends that while the death was “accidental,” the colonel pressured him to attack the outspoken priest to intimidate him.

As Pietruszka testified, in the 10th day of the trial, one of the seven judges hearing the case in the northern city of Torun pointed out numerous discrepancies between his statements in court and those he gave earlier to investigators.

“You keep telling us about your views on morality and truthfulness,” Judge Jurand Maciejewski said tartly. “Why don’t you start being truthful?”

The 47-year-old colonel, the most senior officer to be charged in the Oct. 19 slaying, implicated his own superior, Gen. Zenon Platek, in a short-lived cover-up.

Tell-Tale License Plate He said that Platek learned the day after Popieluszko’s disappearance that an Interior Ministry car with the license plate WAB-6031 had been seen near the church in Bydgoszcz, north of Warsaw, where the priest was last seen alive.

Pietruszka said that when he arrived for work on Sunday, Oct. 21, Gen. Platek summoned him to his office and told him he had seen the car that morning in an Interior Ministry parking lot.

“He told me to call Piotrowski and do something with the car so it wouldn’t be standing out there, until matters were clarified,” the colonel testified.

He added that he did not consider this an attempt to cover up the crime and suggested that “perhaps Gen. Platek wanted Piotrowski to know this had been found out, to see how Piotrowski reacted.”

Capt. Piotrowski has testified that on Col. Pietruszka’s orders he promptly drove the car out of Warsaw and changed the license plate.

Platek, head of the 4th Department of the security service, which monitors Poland’s Roman Catholic Church, has been suspended from duty for failing to exercise adequate supervision, but the government’s indictment indicates that he had no inkling of his officers’ involvement. He is to appear later as a witness.

Father Popieluszko’s death brought a tide of outrage from Poland’s devoutly Catholic population. Amid appeals for calm from the church and leaders of Solidarity, the outlawed independent labor movement, the government launched a nationwide search for the killers that focused at the outset on finding the kidnap car. The priest’s driver, who leaped from the car and became the only known witness to the abduction, provided authorities with a detailed description that left no doubt that the Polish Fiat, equipped with a sophisticated radio, belonged to the Interior Ministry.

Col. Pietruszka, appointed by Gen. Platek to serve on a special commission that was coordinating the investigation, admitted that he ordered Piotrowski to change the car’s license plate and failed to report incriminating statements by the captain.

Pietruszka quoted the captain as saying, “Everyone is asking me about him (Father Popielsuszko). I don’t know. Maybe he is floating in the Vistula River.”

Police divers recovered the priest’s bound, gagged and beaten body from the river 11 days after Piotrowski and two lieutenants, Waldemar Chmielewski and Leszek Pekala, threw it into a reservoir 85 miles north of Warsaw with a sack of stones tied to the legs.

‘Didn’t Believe it Was Real’

Asked to explain why he failed to report the captain’s statement, Pietruszka said, “I did not believe it was real.”

Similarly, he said, the discovery of a Polish police badge at the scene of the kidnaping near Torun only convinced him that it was part of a deliberate effort by someone to implicate and discredit the police.

“To think that someone in the department could do something like this was beyond my belief,” Pietruszka told the court. “My error was that for far too long I held to the notion that this was inconceivable.”