A former Communist prime minister and his wife were found murdered Wednesday in their suburban Warsaw home, his body showing signs of torture, police said.
Piotr Jaroszewicz, 82, served as prime minister from 1970 until he was forced to resign in 1980.A Moscow-backed party loyalist, he oversaw policies that brought Poland's economy to collapse and sparked the August 1980 strikes that led to the creation of the Solidarity trade union movement.
Jaroszewicz was found hanged and his body showed signs of torture, while his wife, Alicja Solska, was killed by a shot from a hunting rifle, the PAP news agency quoted Interior Ministry spokesman Piotr Szczypinski as saying.
Police spokesman Jerzy Kir-zynski said the couple's son discovered his parents' bodies at 1 a.m. in the their house in Anin.
Kirzynski said the death was being investigated as a murder. No motive was known, and a special committee was established to investigate.
Jaroszewicz, who was No. 2 in the Soviet-backed Polish army during World War II, maintained strong ties with the Kremlin while he served as prime minister under Polish Communist Party leader Edward Gierek.
He was Gierek's right-hand man as they fueled an artificial boom by borrowing from the West while investing in ultimately unprofitable heavy industry and flooding the market with consumer goods at artificially low prices.
When Gierek directed Jaros-zewicz to order huge increases in prices for meat, sugar and other staples in 1976, after a five-year freeze, workers reacted with riots.
From that protest was born the Committee for the Defense of Workers, which become eastern Europe's leading group of opposition intellectuals. They went on to join with other workers to form Solidarity.