Polish war crimes prosecutors have opened an investigation into the 1940 massacre in the Katyn forest of more than 21,000 Polish officers and intellectuals by the Soviet secret police, authorities said Wednesday.
Leon Kieres, the head of Poland's National Remembrance Institute, told a news conference that the investigation by 16 of his specialized prosecutors will attempt to add names to the fragmentary records of the Soviet officials and secret police agents who issued, passed on, or carried out the orders to kill the Polish prisoners.
Deputy Justice Minister Andrzej Kalwas said the investigation was an act of "delayed redress and justice toward the innocent victims and to their living relatives."
Until the fall of communism in 1989, any mention of the massacre was forbidden in Poland. The following year, the Soviet government accepted responsibility for the World War II murders.
Soviet agents killed 21,768 Polish military officers, intellectuals and priests in the forests of Katyn and other places. They had taken them prisoner when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939.
The massacre is still an irritant to relations between Poland and Russia, and topped the agenda when Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in September.
After that meeting, Kwasniewski said Russian authorities promised to hand over 96 volumes of documents related to the massacre, which would help the Polish Remembrance Institute conduct its own investigation into the killings.
Though a recent Russian investigation into the massacre failed to produce any new names of suspects, Kieres said he was still hopeful of success because the Polish probe would include interviews with thousands of relatives of the victims, as well as a reexamination of the files.
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