Poland in shock after mayor dies from knife attack

Thousands of people marched in rallies across Poland to pay tribute to the centrist mayor of Gdansk who died Monday, a day after being stabbed in the heart at a charity event.

Pawel Adamowicz died in hospital after a day-long fight by doctors to save him.

"Despite all our efforts, we failed to save him," Doctor Tomasz Stefaniak, director of Gdansk University hospital, told Polish media.

Thousands marched in Gdansk, the Baltic city he ran for two decades, and thousands more turned out in the capital Warsaw. There were rallies in a dozen cities around Poland, the PAP news agency reported.

Sunday's attack on Adamowicz, known for his liberal views and opposition to Poland's governing right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, shocked the country.

 

Polish President Andrzej Duda honoured the "great politician" and announced a day of national mourning to coincide with Adamowicz's funeral, the date of which has yet to be decided.

The European Parliament held a minute of silence on Monday. And European Council President Donald Tusk flew back to his hometown of Gdansk, to attend the rally in memory of his friend and former political ally.

He told the crowd, addressing Adamowicz: "You were always there whenever there was the need to be good and courageous and to take a stand against evil." "Goodbye Pawel, we'll remember you," Lech Walesa, Poland's legendary anti-communist leader and another native of Gdansk, said on Twitter.

The surgeons who battled to save him in surgery said 53-year-old Adamowicz had suffered a serious wound to the heart and cuts to his diaphragm and abdominal organs.

Video footage showed the attacker, who police said was wearing a press badge, bursting on to the stage and launching himself at Adamowicz, as the mayor stood with others waving sparklers towards the end of the fundraiser.

After knifing the mayor several times, the man turned to the crowd with his arms raised triumphantly before being tackled to the ground by security guards and arrested.

Paramedics resuscitated Adamowicz at the scene before rushing him to the hospital.

Gdansk residents rushed to blood donation centres following news that Adamowicz had received 15 litres (32 pints) of blood and required more of the rare O Rh- type.

"We will miss him a lot," 35-year-old teacher Agnieszka Naruszewicz told AFP, describing the late mayor as "kind, friendly, smiling." "When I found out, I was mad and sad at the same time. He was collecting money (at the annual nationwide fundraiser) to save children's lives," said the Gdansk resident.

"The spiral of violence has gone too far in Poland." "It's shocking that something like this could happen in Gdansk," another city resident, 45-year-old office worker Maciej Szczepanski, told AFP.

Prosecutors have charged the 27-year-old male suspect with murder. They said the man had not confessed and he would undergo a psychological assessment due to "doubts about his sanity". If convicted, he could face a life sentence in prison.

In a video recording of the attack posted on YouTube, the suspect was seen seizing the microphone and claiming he had been wrongly jailed by the previous centrist government of the Civic Platform (PO) party and tortured.

"That's why Adamowicz dies," he said. One witness told broadcaster TVN that the man appeared "happy with what he had done".

Adamowicz had been mayor of Gdansk for two decades. The city, with a population of around half a million people, was the cradle of Poland's anti-communist Solidarity movement in the 1980s.

The opposition PO, the arch-rival of the governing PiS, backed his re-election in the 2018 municipal polls and he won with 64 per cent of the vote.

Since winning power nationally in 2015, the PiS has systematically blamed PO politicians for an array of issues. The attacker had previously been sentenced to more than five years in prison for four armed attacks on banks in Gdansk, justice officials said.

Police were investigating how the attacker had been able to breach security to reach the podium.

"We have to establish how (the suspect's press badge) was obtained, was the accreditation in his name and was he really entitled to be there?" local police spokeswoman Joanna Kowalik-Kosinska told reporters.

This type of attack is rare in Poland. A similar incident occurred in 2010 when an assailant gunned down an aide at a regional PiS office before stabbing another PiS employee, who survived.