Walesa Tells of Passport Refusal, Interrogations
Solidarity union founder Lech Walesa said today that he was denied permission to leave Poland to attend a peace conference in Rome and was interrogated by police for the fourth time in a week.
Walesa had planned to fly today to Rome at the invitation of Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti to attend the International Conference on Peace, which begins Wednesday.
Poles do not carry passports and each time they leave the country they must obtain permission from police.
“I was not notified by police I was granted a passport,” he said in a telephone interview with United Press International from his apartment in the seaport city of Gdansk. “It was a government invitation and I was not permitted to travel.”
Walesa also said he underwent a fourth round of interrogations by police, this time lasting three hours. Police have threatened to jail him for up to one year if he disclosed details of the questioning.
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