Three police officers have been detained on suspicion of making charges on a credit card belonging to a Polish official killed in last month's plane crash in Smolensk — including a charge on the same day of the crash, a news report said Sunday.
The credit card belonged to Andrzej Przewoznik, a 46-year-old historian and head of the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites, the Polish web site Thenews.pl reported.
The OMON riot police officers are suspected of stealing the credit card from the crash site and making charges worth 1,400 euros ($1,675), it said.
The credit card was used three times, the first time on the day of the April 10 crash that killed all 96 people on board Poland's presidential Tu-154 jet, including Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife. The plane's wing clipped a tree as it came in for landing at the fogged-in Smolsenk airport that morning. Pilot error has been blamed for the tragedy.
The arrests of the OMON officers were made “with lightning speed, thanks to the cooperation between the [Polish] Internal Security Agency and the Russian special services, who did not let this stand,” said Polish government spokesman Pawel Gras, Thenews.pl reported.
The identities of the suspects were not disclosed.
Smolensk region police denied any arrests and called the Polish report “fiction,” Interfax reported.
Credit cards belonging to Aleksandra Natalli-Swiat, the deputy head of the Law and Justice political party, also went missing in the crash, but no transactions have been reported on them.
Russian authorities made no immediate comment on the arrests Sunday.
The arrests could serve as an embarrassment to the Russian government, whose strong support for Poland in the aftermath of the crash has helped improve long-frayed relations between the two countries.
Russia's police force is notoriously corrupt, and President Dmitry Medvedev ordered its overhaul last December.