REVIEW TOPICS:
Polish soldiers and military counterintelligence jog along badly in Afghanistan
Head of Polish military intelligence allegedly kept coder’s disappearance from his superiors
Missing Polish military intelligence officer was suffering from depression
Belarus President demanded from KGB to raise its role up to level of Soviet period
Russian Federal Security Service investigate appeals on Internet to join illegal armed groups
Former Slovak parliament head was killed in exile by Communist intelligence agents
Anti-terrorist exercises held at Belgrade airport with participation of special units from six countries
Assailants wanted to kill news agency official: National Security Service of Armenia
Polish soldiers and military counterintelligence jog along badly in Afghanistan
Poland’s Minister of Defense, Bogdan Klich has given testimony in the trial of Polish soldiers accused of war crimes in Afghanistan, Polish Radio reports. On August 16, 2007, Polish soldiers became involved in a shooting incident in the village of Nangar Khel, resulting in the killing of eight innocent civilians that was the first mistake Polish soldiers had made in ten
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| Polish special-task troops in Afghanistan |
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months deployment in Afghanistan.
Warsaw’s Military District Court is currently prosecuting seven soldiers for the alleged unlawful use of heavy machine gun fire and mortar shelling in the village, after clashes with Taliban forces.
The court decided to close the trial to the public because former General of the Military Gendarmerie of the Polish Armed Forces, Jan Zukowski, gave testimony on the secret report filed by the Military Counter-Intelligence unit, authored by the then-head Antoni Macierewicz.
Zukowski added that the suggestion that the soldiers intentionally opened-fire on civilians in Nangar Khel first appeared in a report prepared by the Military Counter-Intelligence. According to the soldiers’ defence attorneys, the Counter-Intelligence report ‘set the direction’ for the investigation. Macierewicz, from the Counter-Intelligence unit, refutes the accusations that the statements in the report are a result of a feud between the soldiers and special services officers. Macierewicz stated in May 2008 that such allegations are “completely untrue.”
At the end of April 2009, General Bronislaw Kwiatkowski, responsible for foreign missions, testified that during the Polish soldier’s first deployment in Afghanistan he did not witness any signs of problems or conflict between soldiers and special services. However, he admitted that later he learned of two minor incidents. In the first case, a secret services officer requisitioned a computer in order to secure some classified information. The second incident involves another special services officer who acted out at Tomaszycki’s negative opinion of his work.
General Marek Tomaszycki said that the secret services, instead of first providing the information to the leaders of the contingent, passed it on to their superiors in Poland.
Operational soldiers from the Waza Khwa base, southeast Afghanistan, have expressed a negative opinion throughout the trial about the Military Counterintelligence officers in Afghanistan.
Head of Polish military intelligence allegedly kept coder’s disappearance from his superiors
Has Colonel Radoslaw Kujawa, the head of Polish military intelligence, kept disappearance of the coder Stefan Zielonka from his superiors and police? Findings of the daily Dziennik suggest that this was the case. The military intelligence did not give any information about the officer’s disappearance either to the military public prosecutor's office nor the police.
On the day when the paper revealed that Zielonka had disappeared, the head of military intelligence Colonel Radoslaw Kujawa treid to convince the secret services parliamentary
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Radoslaw Kujawa |
committee that he had done everything to clarify the matter. According to the Dziennik, it is clear that not only the military did not explain anything, but Colonel Kujawa was keeping quiet about the case. The military prosecutor's office knew nothing about the disappearance of the military intelligence coder. "The investigation has been initiated by us on May 13. It was so late because until the publication of the Dziennik nothing was known about the disappearance of warrant officer Zielonka," Colonel Grzegorz Skrzypek, the head of garrison military prosecutor's offices in Warsaw, told the paper.
Unofficially another prosecutor from the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office told the paper that it was scandalous and unusual that the secret services did not inform the prosecutor’s office on incident, „We consider whether the law is not broken, as any officer must inform the Public Prosecutor's Office about an offense."
An official of the military prosecutor's office explained to the newspaper that the investigation treated the coder’s case as desertion as „this is the only legal possibility”. He added that nevertheless all threads had been fully investigated, including negligence of the secret service.
"We together with the police search for missing soldiers. In the case of Zielonka we did not receive any notification," Lieutenant-Colonel Marcin Wiacek from the military police told the newspaper. But why was the disappearance of Zielonka not been reported? "This is not a question to us, but to military intelligence," was Wiacek’s reply.
Who is in the Polish army searching for Zielonka? It is only the military counterintelligence service, headed in the Civic Platform government by Colonel Janusz Nosek. The paper marks that he is a good friend of Kujawa, both come from the Internal Security Agency (ABW) and both belong to the so-called. Krakow group. "They are colleagues from distant past, even still from the work in the State Protection Office. I doubt that Nosek allowed his men to find out anything that could cause trouble to Kujawa," an official form the Warsaw police told the Dziennik.
“In this case you can see a complete lack of professionalism. Is it done intentionally or not should explain the prosecutor,” marks General Konstanty Malejczyk, former head of Military Information Services.
Missing Polish military intelligence officer was suffering from depression
A secret report on the missing Polish military intelligence coder Stefan Zielonka, who disappeared a month ago, has been sent to the office of President of Poland Lech Kaczynski, daily Dziennik reports. The National Security Office (Biuro Bezpieczenstwa Narodowego - BBN) document shows that Zielonka was treated in connection with depression. The Dziennik was the first which wrote about mysterious disappearance of the officer.
Radio RMF FM which has acquainted with the report prepared by the National Security Office says that Zielonka who knows the most confidential secrets of the intelligence services wanted to leave the service, but his superiors disagreed. 52-year old warrant officer Zielonka has been searched without success by the secret services and police. Investigators do not exclude any version from accidental death to treason.
"We are helpless. We have an impression that military intelligence did not tell us everything," Dziennik cites a Warsaw metropolitan police officer. Particularly strange is that according to superiors of the missing officer he did not have neither service nor private apartment and had to live in the same flat with his divorced wife..
The Polish Military Prosecutor's office has been trying to determine whether the missing military intelligence officer Stefan Zielonka has not deserted, daily Rzeczpospolita reports. According to media reports, checks are carried out to determine whether any crimes have been committed regarding Zielonka, Colonel Grzegorz Skrzypek, the head of the Military Prosecutor's Office of Warsaw garrison, confirmed in an interview with the news portal Tvp.info.
As revealed by the service, military investigators have been conducting investigation in connection with Article 339 of the Penal Code on desertion. It appears, however, that, in fact, neither prosecutor’s office or police, nor the secret service do not know what happened to Stefan Zielonka after he left his house on April 12.
The experts interviewed by the Rzeczpospolita say that the most likely reason for the disappearance of the officer was his frustration in dealing with problems at work. His acquaintances say Zielonka had family problems. Defense Minister Bogdan Klich says that more and more probable hypothesis is related to the problems of the officer’s private life. He has repeatedly marked that Zielonka’s disappearance does not affect either the security of the Military Intelligence Service, or the security of the state.
Still the people associated with the secret services did not exclude in interviews with the newspaper that the military intelligence coder who knew many secrets could collaborate with foreign intelligence. Defense Minister Klich yesterday denied report of the daily Dziennik that that the military counterespionage service has hidden the coder’s divorced wife.
Daily Dziennik also reported that Colonel Radoslaw Kujawa, the head of military intelligence, had tried to hide the fact of disappearance of Stefan Zielonka. The military intelligence did not report on the case neither to the military prosecutor's office nor the police.
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| Belarus KGB HQs |
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Belarus President demanded from KGB to raise its role up to level of Soviet period
The President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko has demanded the State Security Committee to strengthen its work, including in the sphere of struggle against corruption, news agency Interfax reports from Minsk.
"Bodies of state security should work much better and the role and value of the KGB should be lifted on the height on which they were during the best Soviet times", declared Lukashenko, meeting with the KGB chairman Vadim Zaitsev who made a report to the President, according to the news agency.
Russian Federal Security Service investigate appeals on Internet to join illegal armed groups
The Federal Security Service of Russia directorate in the Chechen republic has been investigating the case of Ilman Estamirov, suspected of making appeals to population via the Internet to engage in illegal armed formations for terrorist activities, online paper Newsland reports, referring to the representative of the press service of the republican prosecutor's office.
According to him, Ilman Estamirov is in federal search on suspicion of involvement in the illegal armed formations. According to the FSB directorate, the members of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Centre on counteraction against extremism of the Ministry of Interior of the Chechen Republic have received a videotape in which «seven to nine participants of illegal armed formations in camouflaged unform and armed were shown firing from automatic weapons in a forested area».
«One of the members of the illegal armed group, Estamirov, has publicly appealed to unlimited number of Internet users of Chechen nationality to join the illegal armed formations, which have an aim of overthrowing the foundations of the constitutional order and the integrity of Russia, bringing to sacrifice themselves for their criminal intentions», news agency RIA Novosti cites the source in the prosecutor's office.
Anti-terrorist exercises held at Belgrade airport with participation of special units from six countries
Anti-terrorist exercises were taking place earlier this month at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport, online paper Serbiann reports. French Ambassador to Serbia Jean Francois Terral attended the special-task units training event along with Serbia’s Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic.
The Serbian Special Anti-terrorist Unit (SAJ) and the Counter-terrorist Unit (PTJ), Serbian Gendarmerie and the French anti-terrorist unit RAID together participated in the anti-terrorist exercises.
According to Serbianna, the exercises were also attended by Bulgarian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin special-task units.
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| Matus Cernak |
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Former Slovak parliament head was killed in exile by Communist intelligence agents
The files of former Czechoslovak intelligence service agents contain indications that the Communist secret services could have been behind a fatal attack on former Slovak parliament head in exile Matus Cernak, news agency CTK reports, referring to Institute for Totalitarian Regimes Studies (USTR) head Pavel Zacek. The assassination took place in Munich, Germany, in May 1955. Cernak was killed in a blast after he opened a package containing explosive; two other people died and 20 were injured in the explosion.
"Though the direct file on the operation against Cernak has not been preserved there are indications, for instance, in the files of various intelligence service agents that the intelligence participated in the attack against Cernak," Zacek said. Previously, the attack was ascribed to the Czechoslovak state security police StB that included the Czechoslovak intelligence service.
According to historians, the task force called Vlast operated within the intelligence whose tasks were murders and kidnappings of the traitors or former members of the StB, the Czechoslovak border guard, secret collaborators and refugees whom communist courts sentenced to death.
This was an elite squad within the Czechoslovak intelligence service, Zacek said.
Previously, he said that the squad agents first tried to lure the "traitors of the regime" into cooperation and at least discredit them in the event of failure.
Their liquidation was implemented on the basis of permits issued by the General Prosecutor's Office, the interior minister or the intelligence service chief.
The special task force was established in 1966, it reportedly ended its activities at the end of 1967 and the beginning of 1968 and its agents did not kill anyone, CTK notes.
The daily Mlada fronta Dnes reported last year that the squad was established on the orders of then Czechoslovak interior minister (1961-1965) Lubomir Strougal who was later Czechoslovak Prime Minister. However, CTK has obtained a document signed by Strougal saying that the information was untrue because the unit was established only in 1966. The special task force planned, with the approval of the Soviet secret service, subversive operations on the territory of Austria, Germany, France and the Benelux, CTK adds.
Assailants wanted to kill news agency official: National Security Service of Armenia
A criminal case on the fact of an attack on the news agency Armenia Today coordinator Argishti Kiviryan has been requalified on Article 34-104 of the Criminal Code of Armenia on an attempted murder, Armenia Today reports. It notes that previously the criminal case was brought on the basis of Article 117, on intentional infliction of light injury. The case has been investigated by the National Security Service of Armenia.
On April 30, an assassination attempt was carried out against Kiviryan and he was hospitalized with serious injuries. David Petrosyan, expert of the Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations, points out that the police filed a case on the grounds of Article 117 the Criminal Code of Armenia on intentional infliction of light injury to health, although it was known that Kiviryan was wounded from a firearm.
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