WARSAW (Reuters) -Two Polish lawmakers ordered by a court to go to prison have been arrested at the presidential palace, local media reported on Tuesday, escalating a conflict between the nationalist head of state and the new pro-European government.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk had earlier accused President Andrzej Duda of obstructing justice after the two lawmakers appeared at the palace, prompting police to search for them in cars leaving the building.
The accusations over the two lawmakers – Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik – were the latest salvo in a row that is likely to be one of many during a period of cohabitation in which the government and president are from different political camps.
In 2015, weeks after the nationalist PiS took power, Duda issued a pardon to Kaminski after he was convicted of abuse of power in a previous role as head of Poland’s Central Anti-Corruption Bureau. The pardon allowed him to become interior minister. Kaminski had been accused of allowing agents under his command to use entrapment in an investigation.
Both Kaminski and Wasik are from the PiS.
Lawyers questioned whether Duda could pardon Kaminski before an appeals court had issued a final ruling. The Supreme Court said last year the case should be reopened and Kaminski and Wasik, his deputy in the interior ministry, were sentenced last month to two years in prison for abuse of power.
(Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, Pawel Florkiewicz, Anna Koper, Karol Badohal, Justyna Pawlak; Editing by Alan Charlish, Christina Fincher, Gareth Jones and Mark Heinrich)
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