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Evidence suggests that Russian secret services appear to have ordered the blowing up of a railway line in Poland over the weekend that is on a crucial route that delivers aid to Ukraine, a government spokesperson said Tuesday.
“Everything indicates” that the rail incident was “initiated by the Russian secret services,” Jacek Dobrzyński, the spokesperson for Poland’s secret services minister, said on Tuesday morning, according to the Polish Press Agency, or PAP.
In what Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an “unprecedented act of sabotage,” a segment of a rail line linking Poland’s capital, Warsaw, to the border with Ukraine was blown up over the weekend. Another segment further south was also damaged in what officials say was likely sabotage as well.
That rail line is being used to transport aid to Ukraine, Polish officials said.
Dobrzyński was speaking to the media after a meeting of the governmental National Security Committee, which took place Tuesday morning with the participation of military commanders, heads of the intelligence services and a representative of the president. Army patrols have been sent to check the safety of railways and other key infrastructure in the east of the country, the defence minister said.
Polish prosecutors have initiated an investigation into “acts of sabotage of a terrorist nature” directed against railway infrastructure and committed for the benefit of foreign intelligence.
“These actions brought about an immediate danger of a land traffic disaster, threatening the lives and health of many people and property on a large scale,” prosecutors said in a statement.
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Operation Eastern Sentry was launched in September after a number of drones crossed into Poland, and in recent weeks suspicious drones have shut down European airports.
Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz told Radio Zet on Tuesday that authorities were investigating the planned use of a camera found near the damaged tracks on the Warsaw-Lublin route.
In the first incident, an explosion damaged the tracks near the village of Mika, about 100 kilometres southeast of Warsaw and, in a separate incident, power lines were destroyed in the area of Puławy, about 50 kilometres from Lublin. Trains carrying passengers were forced to stop at both locations, but no one was hurt.
“The explosion was most likely intended to blow up the train,” Tusk said on Monday in reference to the Mika incident.
The damage caused at both locations has since been repaired.
