The case of the rape of a young policewoman by her superior, Marcin J., on the premises of the Warsaw Police Prevention Unit in Piaseczno, has returned. Earlier, an alcohol-fuelled gathering involving a larger group of people had taken place there. An analysis of phone calls between officers has produced new evidence. Prosecutors will question officers from the unit again.
Since January this year, the case has been investigated by the Warsaw Regional Prosecutor’s Office. Official complaints that Marcin J. had allegedly been drinking alcohol at the Police Prevention Unit had reached the Police Internal Affairs Bureau much earlier, already last year. Despite these findings, the officer was not punished. He was detained, and any action was taken only after he was accused of rape.
New evidence and further questioning
Marcin J. was released at the beginning of March. At the time, the Warsaw Regional Prosecutor’s Office announced that his pre-trial detention had been lifted and that bail and police supervision had been imposed instead. The former officer is also banned from leaving the country.
According to the prosecutor handling the case, there was no risk that the suspect would persuade others to give false testimony or obstruct the proceedings. Twenty-eight witnesses have been questioned in the case, six of them twice.
Now, as we have learned, the same people will be questioned again. Why has this proved necessary? It is probably connected to phone calls made between officers from the unit at the beginning of the year.
“I can only confirm that we discovered various traces and information on the phones which require us to conduct supplementary questioning of a number of officers who have already been questioned,”
Piotr Antoni Skiba, spokesman for the Warsaw Regional Prosecutor’s Office, told the Niezależna.pl portal. He declined to provide further details.
As the prosecutor’s office reported in March, the decision on the timing and manner of concluding the proceedings against the officer accused of rape was to be made after complete materials from the examination of digital data carriers had been obtained, as these are of significant importance to the case. Now the case will be prolonged because, after the examination of, among other things, the phones, additional questioning is needed.
In March, the spokesman for the Warsaw prosecutor’s office indicated that the evidence gathered so far “does not confirm the course and circumstances of the incident as presented by some media outlets immediately after the event.” Asked by Niezależna.pl on Tuesday whether he maintains that position in light of the new evidence, he replied in the affirmative.
A disastrous timeline and Kierwiński’s explanations
As Niezależna.pl reported in January this year, the officer suspected of raping the policewoman in Piaseczno was tested for alcohol only five hours after the incident, according to the investigation materials. Almost 12 hours passed between the incident and his detention. During that time, the suspect remained in the same unit and was “supervised” by officers directly responsible for what was happening on site.
“I decided to speak out because I can no longer listen to the way you PiS hyenas are behaving. You are hyenas. You are engaging in disgusting politicking over this woman’s suffering. In this case, the response of the Polish police was immediate,” Interior and Administration Minister Marcin Kierwiński told PiS MPs in the Sejm shortly after the media reported on the rape allegation.
Let us recall what Niezależna.pl established at the beginning of January:
• The incident, namely the rape of the young policewoman and forcing her to submit to another sexual act, was said to have occurred on Saturday, January 3, at around 3:30 a.m.
• The first test of the suspect was reportedly carried out only at 8:15 a.m. It showed that he was still under the influence of alcohol. Two further tests followed.
• At 10:35 a.m., the formal report from the victim began to be recorded. The questioning lasted until 12:00 p.m.
• The formal detention was carried out at 2:45 p.m. by officers of the Police Internal Affairs Bureau from Warsaw, on the premises of the unit in Piaseczno. Until the Internal Affairs Bureau took over, the suspect was, as the prosecutor’s office spokesman put it in a conversation with Niezależna,pl, “under the supervision of the command of the Warsaw Police Prevention Unit.”
For 12 hours, the suspected perpetrator remained under the questionable “supervision” of people who were directly responsible for the fact that such a scandalous incident was allegedly able to take place in that very unit. They may therefore have had an interest in potentially covering up the matter.
On January 8, the police announced that “the deputy commander of the Police Prevention Unit in Warsaw was dismissed from his post on January 7 in connection with the suspicion that an offence had been committed by an officer subordinate to him, whose company he supervised in the line of duty.”
Procedural actions involving the suspect began at the District Prosecutor’s Office in Piaseczno on January 4 at 1:30 p.m. The detention hearing began on January 5 at 11:00 a.m. at the District Court in Piaseczno. The decision to impose pre-trial detention was issued between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. that same day.
