WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Evidence suggests Russian intelligence agencies apparently ordered the bombing of a railway line in Poland over the weekend, a government official said Tuesday.
“Everything points” to the fact that the railway incident was “initiated by Russian intelligence services,” spokesman for the Polish Security Minister Jacek Dobrzynski said on Tuesday morning, the Polish Press Agency (PAP) reported.
In what Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an “unprecedented act of sabotage,” a section of the railway line linking the Polish capital Warsaw to the border with Ukraine was blown up over the weekend. Another site further south was also damaged in what officials said was also likely sabotage.
According to Polish officials, the railway line is used to deliver aid to Ukraine.
Dobrzhinsky spoke to the media after a meeting of the government's national security committee on Tuesday morning with the participation of military commanders, intelligence chiefs and a presidential representative. Army patrols were sent to check the security of railways and other key infrastructure in the east of the country, the defense minister said.
The Polish prosecutor's office has launched an investigation into “sabotage of a terrorist nature” directed against railway infrastructure and committed in the interests of foreign intelligence.
“These actions created an immediate threat of a ground transportation disaster, threatening the lives and health of many people and property on a large scale,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz told Radio Zet on Tuesday that authorities were investigating the planned use of a camera found near damaged tracks on the Warsaw-Lublin route.
In the first incident, an explosion damaged tracks near the village of Mika, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Warsaw, and in another incident, power lines were destroyed in the Pulaw region, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Lublin. Trains carrying passengers were forced to stop at both locations, but no one was injured.
“Most likely the purpose of the explosion was to blow up the train,” Tusk said on Monday, referring to the Mika incident.
