Polish radio couple jailed

Press, 19 February 1983, Page 9

Polish radio couple jailed

NZPA-Reuter Warsaw The leader of a group of underground activists who established the clandestine Radio Solidarity during the martial law period, Zbigniew Romaszewski, was sentenced to 4'2 years in prison yesterday by a military court. Official sources who attended the closed trial said that his wife, Zofia Romaszewski. an announcer on the radio station, was given three years. They said that seven others involved received sentences from

seven months to 2'a years, some suspended. Mr Romaszewski. a longtime civil rights campaigner who had helped establish the Workers’ Defence Committee dissident movement in the 19705, was a senior official of the independent Solidarity union before its closing under martial law. Radio Solidarity broadcast more than a dozen programmes encouraging opposition to the military authorities and giving information about demonstrations and people arrested between

April and August last year. It used taped messages attached to often crude transmitters placed in high buildings in the capital, and was usually jammed by the authorities. Clandestine radios also operated in other cities including Wroclaw and Poznan. On the day the Romaszewski trial opened, supporters transmitted a brief but defiant programme heard in central Warsaw, praising the courage of the defendants and giving an account of the first session.

Mr Romaszewski. aged 43. was a member of the national commission of Solidarity which was dissolved by an Act of Parliament last . October. He was the third prominent underground organiser to be caught and sentenced. Two leaders in the volatile industrial city of Wroclaw, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk and Piotr Brdnarz, who served on the underground's national co-ordinating committee, received terms of six and four years respectively last (northern) autumn.