Man climbs Warsaw monument and reportedly threatens to blow himself up

This story has been updated to acknowledge that the man has been successfully removed by police.

Police today closed off one of Warsaw’s main squares after a man climbed a monument and reportedly threatened to blow himself up with a bomb he had in his bag.

The monument – which is dedicated to victims of the 2010 Smolensk air crash – has been a point of political tension between the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and its opponents and today’s incident comes one day before elections. However, there is no indication that the two issues are related.

At around 11:30 a.m. today, BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford – who is in Warsaw to cover the elections – published an image from her hotel window overlooking Piłsudski Square. It showed a man, apparently in a balaclava, standing atop the Smolensk memorial.

Rainsford reported that police had blocked off local streets and instructed guests to remain inside the hotel. At around the same time, Warsaw’s police headquarters announced that “for safety reasons, Piłsudski Square and the adjacent area have been closed to traffic. Police officers are on site”.

A police spokesman subsequently informed the Polish Press Agency (PAP) that negotiators were speaking with the man and that several hundred officers, including counter-terrorism forces, had been deployed to the area.

He refused to confirm or deny reports that the man was holding something in his hand and threatening to detonate explosives in his backpack.

Update: shortly before 2 p.m. police announced that they had detained the man after negotiators managed to remove him from the monument.

Police have detained the man who climbed a monument in Warsaw and reportedly threatened to blow himself up.

Police negotiators reportedly managed to remove him, almost three hours after the incident began https://t.co/UbaDhCy1if

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) October 14, 2023

The Smolensk memorial commemorates the 96 people who died in a plane crash in Russia on 10 April 2010. Among the victims was then President Lech Kaczyński and his wife Maria, along with dozens of other high-ranking military officers, politicians and other officials.

While official Russian and Polish investigations found the crash to have been an accident, Lech Kaczyński’s identical twin brother, Jarosław, the chairman of PiS, has promoted the idea that it was in fact deliberately caused. He has suggested the true causes were covered up by Russia and the Polish government of the time.

Since coming to power in 2015, the PiS government has spent years and millions of zloty re-investigating the crash and its surrounding circumstances. Despite regular promises from Kaczyński to reveal the “truth”, so far no conclusive evidence has been presented.

Since being erected in 2018, the Smolensk memorial on Piłsudski Square has become both a place of commemoration but also often a site of protests against the PiS government.

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Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.