Two months ago, the body of Wladyslaw Sikorski, the Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile in London during the Second World War, was exhumed in order to find the cause of his mysterious death. Prosecutors were specifically investigating a communist sponsored crime in the belief that he was murdered by the government of the Soviet Union at a time of increasingly tense diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union. Prior to his death, Sikorski had notably called for an investigation into the massacre of more than 20,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest and the finger was being pointed more and more towards the NKVD. Tension was further heightened by Soviet moves towards the creation of a communist sponsored Polish government for the postwar period.

The results of the forensic tests, published at the end of last week, reveal, however, that Sikorski was not murdered and was alive when the plane in which he was returning to London from the Middle East crashed on July 4th, 1943.