Police entered Poland’s presidential palace on Tuesday to detain two of its former leaders, Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik, fulfilling a court order to imprison the former interior minister and his deputy and escalating the conflict between the head of state and the new government, RMF 24 reports.
Earlier, Prime Minister Donald Tusk accused President Andrzej Duda of obstruction of justice after the two lawmakers appeared at the palace, prompting police to search for them in cars driving away from the building.
After coming to power in October elections, Tusk, a former top European Union official, vowed to reverse the policies of his predecessors, the Law and Justice (PiS) party, who faced accusations of undermining democracy during their eight-year rule.
New Interior Minister Marcin Kierwinski said “everyone is equal before the law”.
Grazyna Ignaczak-Bandych, the head of the president’s chancellery, told private broadcaster TV Republika that police entered the palace while Duda was at his other official residence in Warsaw, Belweder, meeting exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. She noted:
We believe that they entered illegally, the chancellery employees did not resist, the police were rude, they did not want to talk to me and they did not provide me with any document that would authorise their actions. When (Duda) was informed, he wanted to come immediately, but the exit from the Belweder Palace was blocked by a city bus.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in front of the presidential palace at the call of the PiS party, of which Kaminski and Vasic are members, and in front of the police station where the detainees are being held. The crowd chanted “Release the political prisoners” and “Shame!”.
In a post on X, PiS spokesman Rafal Bochenek called the police action earlier in the day “an illegal kidnapping and a violation of all democratic rules.”
In 2015, weeks after PiS came to power, Duda, a PiS ally, pardoned Kaminski after he was convicted of abuse of power in his previous post as head of Poland’s Central Anti-Corruption Bureau.
The pardon allowed him to become interior minister. Kaminski was accused of allowing agents subordinate to him to use a method of entrapment during investigations. He has denied his guilt.
The Supreme Court ruled last year that the case should be reopened, and Kaminski and Wasik, his deputy at the Interior Ministry, were sentenced last month to two years in prison for abuse of power. On Tuesday, the presidential office published a picture of Kaminski and Wasik with Duda at an official event at the palace.
