The Minister of the Interior of the previous Polish populist government, Mariusz Kaminski, and one of his close collaborators, Maciej Wasik, were arrested on Tuesday evening, January 9, at the presidential palace by the police, said Czeslaw Mroczek, Deputy Minister of the Interior. “Arrested in accordance with the court decision”, he wrote on information later confirmed by the police.
In December, a Polish court sentenced the interior minister in the previous nationalist government and his close collaborator to two years in prison on appeal for having exceeded their duties in a case dating back to 2007. At the time, head of the central anti-corruption office, Mr. Kaminski had ordered an investigation deemed illegal targeting a member of the ruling coalition, led by the nationalist and populist Law and Justice (PiS) party.
A controversial personality, Mariusz Kaminski had also served as coordinator of the secret services and embodies, in the eyes of his critics, the authoritarian tendencies within the PiS, which lost power following the legislative elections in October.
“We are not hiding”
Monday evening, a court issued an arrest warrant against the two men, who claim their innocence, citing a presidential pardon granted by President Andrzej Duda in 2015 and questioned by the Supreme Court. Elected deputies during the October elections, the two men saw their mandate canceled on Friday, which they refuse to recognize.
Police were unable to find the two men at their home on Tuesday morning. But they appeared shortly after alongside President Andrzej Duda, himself from PiS, during a ceremony at the presidential palace, where they then spent the entire day. According to media reports, the president was absent at the time of the arrest.
In the afternoon, the two men made a statement in the courtyard of the presidential palace. “We are not hiding, we are here with the president, we know that police forces are gathered near the presidency in order to arrest us”Mr. Kaminski told the press. “If we end up in prison, we will be political prisoners”he added.
“This is an unprecedented situation”commented before the arrest the pro-European Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a situation in which “convicted persons who must be taken by the police to a place of isolation choose another place of isolation, probably more comfortable, (…) the presidential palace ». The head of government also accused “the political camp that governed Poland for eight years” to have provoked “unprecedented legal chaos”.