Polish Steel Mill Raided, Strike’s Leaders Arrested

Plainclothes police surprised sleeping workers with percussion grenades today in a pre-dawn raid at the Nowa Huta steel mill and arrested the leaders of a 10-day-old strike, official and church sources said.

An opposition leader said police beat and injured 41 people at the huge plant in Krakow. The government said some work resumed there after the crackdown.

At the Gdansk shipyard, site of another major work stoppage, Communist authorities ordered a lockout, and police in full riot gear ringed the yard.

At the Nowa Huta plant, police entered strike headquarters, detonated percussion grenades and arrested most strike committee members, said Krzystof Kozlowski, a senior Roman Catholic journalist in Krakow. Percussion grenades are designed to create a loud noise and no injury.

Riot Police Enter Plant

Later, riot police entered and ordered all strikers to leave. Half the plant’s 32,000 work force were on strike.

“Nobody suffered any harm or injury,” government spokesman Jerzy Urban said in a telephone interview. State-run radio said at least 38 people were arrested.

But Zygmunt Lenyk of the conservative opposition group Confederation of Independent Poland said some strikers not detained were severely beaten. He said 32 people suffered cuts, eight were left unconscious and one had two legs broken.

The official PAP news agency said some plant departments resumed work while others remained idle so that maintenance work could be done on equipment stopped “without preparation” during the strike.

In Gdansk, Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said in a taped interview smuggled out of the Lenin Shipyard, “The moment of the solution similar to that at Nowa Huta is approaching.” In a tense-sounding voice, he vowed to be “the last to leave.”

Riot police turned away a crowd that gathered outside the yard, birthplace of Solidarity.