Polish officers’ bodies to be exhumed
The bodies of three Polish Army officers who died in the plane crash that killed their country’s wartime leader, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, are to be exhumed from Newark Cemetery.
The Ministry of Defence has agreed that the bodies can be removed from the Polish war graves section.
A marquee was erected over the three graves on Tuesday to provide privacy and the bodies are likely to be exhumed either today or tomorrow.
A delegation from Poland visited the cemetery yesterday to discuss the arrangements.
The remains will be taken to London and on to Poland with full military honours for a post mortem examination.
The bodies are those of the Chief of the Polish General Staff, Major General Tadeusz Klimecki; the Chief of Operation Staff, Colonel Andrzej Marecki; and Lieutenant Jozef Ponikiwski.
They died with General Sikorski when his RAF Liberator plunged into the sea after taking off from Gibraltar in July, 1943.
General Sikorski’s remains were exhumed from Newark Cemetery in 1992 and taken back to Poland where he is now buried in the Hall of Kings in Wawel Cathedral.
Lieutenant Ponikiwski will be reburied in the Roman Catholic churchyard at Oporowo, Poland, and the two others will be reburied in the Powazki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.
A wartime inquiry ruled that the crash was an accident but there have long been rumours that there was more to it.
Conspiracy theories include suggestions that the accident was the work of Stalin’s assassins or British agents working under Churchill’s orders.
There was also a suggestion that the plane may have been carrying cases of smuggled brandy that interfered with the controls in some way.
A post mortem was carried out on General Sikorski’s body in November, 2008 following suggestions that he may have been poisoned before take-off.
It confirmed that the remains were those of the general and that he had died from injuries consistent with a plane crash.
Post mortems are planned to see if the other officers suffered similar injuries.
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance is in charge of investigating crimes committed during the war and under Communist rule.
