Polish families take Russia to court over massacre

WARSAW, Apr 22 (Reuters) The families of some of the thousands of Polish citizens massacred by Soviet secret police in 1940 will take Russian authorities to the European Court of Human Rights, Polish newspapers reported today.

The 70 families lodging the complaint want the Strasbourg-based tribunal to rule on whether the Katyn Forest killings could be regarded as genocide.

The atrocity remains a major bone of contention in the often strained relations between Warsaw and Moscow.

''We are not interested in revenge or even punishing anyone,'' Katyn survivor Monsignor Zdzislaw Peszkowski told Reuters. ''We only want the full truth to be universally known.'' ''This is not just a Polish issue. Revealing all the circumstances of this atrocity is needed to finally close the chapter known as World War Two,'' said Peszkowski, 85, a tireless defender of Katyn families' rights and Poland's 2006 Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

Newspapers reported that the first suit has been filed by Witomila Wolk-Jezierska who was only three when her officer father was captured by the Soviets in the early days of the Second World War.

He was one of some 15,000 Polish soldiers, officials and intellectuals murdered with a shot to the back of the head at three massacre sites. The bodies of another 7,000 Polish prisoners of war have never been found.

The massacre followed the 1939 partition of Poland by Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany at the start of World War Two. Germany broke the alliance by invading the Soviet Union in 1941, and in 1943 advancing German uncovered the mass graves in Katyn forest, near Smolensk.

For nearly half a century Moscow tried to blame Germany for the atrocity.

Only in 1990 did Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev admit that the Soviet secret police NKVD had been responsible.

Russian investigations into the case dragged on for over a decade, ruling last year that the massacre was not genocide but a common crime whose statute of limitations had expired.

Poland has launched its own probe but has been hampered by Russian delays in handing over case documents, two-thirds of which Moscow has refused to declassify.

REUTERS KD HT2335