“These are practices straight from the dark communist era,” said former Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro when asked about the arrest of Piotr Pogonowski.
On Monday at around 6:00 a.m., police officers detained the former head of the Internal Security Agency (ABW), reported Do Rceczy.
Pogonowski failed to appear three times at the Sejm committee session, citing the September ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal, which declared the committee’s actions unconstitutional. So, now he will be forced to come before the parliamentary committee of inquiry into Pegasus at 10:00 a.m. on Monday.
The District Court in Warsaw accepted the committee’s motion to impose a fine of PLN 3,000 on Pogonowski and issued a decision to detain him and forcibly bring him in for questioning. This is the first such situation in the history of the Polish Sejm.
Piotr Pogonowski served as head of the Internal Security Agency from 2016 to 2020. Since 2020, he has been a member of the management board of the National Bank of Poland, where he supervises the departments of administration, security and control.
“The arrest of Piotr Pogonowski is a crime for which those responsible should be held accountable. Any Polish citizen who displeases the current government may be arrested in the future without any basis. This cannot be ignored. These are practices straight from the dark communist era,” Zbigniew Ziobro said on TV Republika.
Recalling the Constitutional Tribunal’s judgment of Sept. 10, Ziobro said, “The Constitutional Tribunal’s judgments are universally binding and indisputable. The so-called Pegasus Commission was established in a manner inconsistent with the Constitution, in terms of the procedure and scope of its operation.”
“We are dealing with a creeping coup d’état, with the law being violated in many areas. (…) All in order to gain political and material benefits,” he said, adding that this is a part of “a series of crimes.”Meanwhile, Piotr Semka, a columnist for the weekly Do Rzeczy, believes that the arrest of Piotr Pogonowski can be treated as “a form of pressure on the National Bank of Poland.”
