Pro-Solidarity Priest Assaulted for Second Time

A pro-Solidarity priest who reported that he was attacked and burned on the face and abdomen by an unknown assailant last April was attacked again early Wednesday by three people who ransacked his apartment, the priest’s mother told reporters.

The mother, Teresa Isakowicz, said that two men and a woman used a ruse to enter the apartment of Father Tadeusz Zaleski in the southern city of Krakow at 4 a.m., then bound, gagged and beat the 29-year-old priest and ransacked his apartment. He was hospitalized under police guard, reportedly with head and facial injuries.

She said the three assailants, wearing the white coats of ambulance attendants, got into his apartment by telling him that the provost of his church had suffered a stroke.

Broke Free

“They barged into the apartment, gagged him, tied his hands and also had ropes around his neck,” Isakowicz told Western reporters by telephone. She said her son managed to break free after the assailants fled.

An official at the Interior Ministry in Warsaw, which oversees the police and security forces, said the incident was under investigation. But the official, Andrzej Sadlinski, suggested that the priest may have imagined the attack, and added that “Father Zaleski is an ill man.”

Zaleski, who is known as a human rights activist and a supporter of Solidarity, the outlawed independent trade union movement, was treated for burns on his face and abdomen last Easter. He told the police that a man wearing a ski mask had attacked him in the basement of his apartment building, knocked him unconscious with a blast of an unidentified gas and burned him.

Church sources and family friends confirmed that the priest had about 20 small burn marks on his face and abdomen in the form of two “Vs,” symbols of the Solidarity movement.

Tourist Tortured

In a similar attack three weeks earlier, a French tourist, Frederic Castaing, 42, was assaulted in Krakow by three unidentified men not long after local authorities had confiscated Solidarity literature from him. Castaing was tortured with lighted cigarettes. No one has been arrested in connection with this incident.

The government dropped its investigation of the Zaleski case, saying there was no evidence of any attack on him and suggesting that he had burned himself in an epileptic seizure.

Coming only weeks after four secret police officers were convicted of murdering another pro-Solidarity priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the two incidents in Krakow have gave rise to speculation that renegade elements of the security forces were still trying to intimidate activist clerics and discredit Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski.

Two senior police officials in Krakow later stepped down from their posts, but government spokesmen denied any connection with the two incidents.

Another Theory

Diplomatic observers speculated that Wednesday’s attack on Zaleski may have been a further attempt to embarrass Jaruzelski during his hastily arranged, one-day visit to Paris for a meeting with President Francois Mitterrand. Jaruzelski, amid growing difficulties in making payments on Poland’s $29.2-billion debt to the West, is believed to be seeking French help in speeding up acceptance of Poland’s application to join the International Monetary Fund.