Walesa and 2 Aides Questioned About Alleged Plot to Kill Him

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and two aides were questioned Friday by the Gdansk state prosecutor investigating a purported plot against Walesa’s life, a spokesman for the head of the outlawed union said.

The prosecutor is checking out an account given by Jozef Szczepanski, 34, a convicted killer who was arrested after warning Walesa May 9 that an underground organization had recruited him to kill Walesa, offering him money for the assassination.

Bogdan Olszewski, an aide to Walesa, said the leader of the free trade union movement was questioned for slightly more than an hour after he left his job at the Lenin Shipyard in the Baltic port of Gdansk.

“The only thing Walesa wants to say is that it was a regular routine hearing in the case of Mr. Szczepanski,” said Olszewski, interviewed by telephone at Walesa’s Gdansk apartment. “He was asked only about the facts concerning the case.”

Olszewski said that he and another Walesa aide, Arkadiusz Rybicki, were also questioned about the case Friday.

Refused to Give Up Tapes

Another Walesa aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Walesa refused to give the prosecutor tape recordings and the original copy of Szczepanski’s written statement made at Walesa’s apartment May 9. Walesa earlier provided copies of the statement to the police.

In his statement, Szczepanski said an underground organization contacted him while he was serving 11 years in prison for killing a man in a 1977 brawl.

After obtaining a six-month temporary release from prison last October, Szczepanski said he was contacted several times by an unidentified man who offered him several thousand dollars, a passport and an American-made pistol with which to shoot Walesa.

Szczepanski said he initially agreed to the offer to get evidence about the plot but finally rejected the assassination proposal at an April 26 meeting.

He said the man threatened to kill him if he told about the plot, but that he decided to warn Walesa because he “hated Communists (and) was a Solidarity supporter.”

Walesa said earlier that he is treating the murder plot seriously and conducting his own investigation of Szczepanski’s account.

In another development, Andrzej Gwiazda, Solidarity’s former national deputy chairman, returned home to Gdansk, Friday after spending five months in jail for disturbing the peace. He was sentenced after a clash between demonstrators and police last December.