European Council President Donald Tusk has been summoned by Warsaw prosecutors investigating a secret deal between Russian and Polish intelligence services, the niezalezna.pl website has reported.

But a spokesman for Tusk, who was re-elected President of the European Council last week, said the former Polish prime minister cannot appear in Warsaw as a witness in a hearing scheduled for Wednesday since he is due to address the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

A spokesman for the district Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw told the PAP news agency that Tusk has been summoned in a probe into former bosses of Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW) allegedly cooperating with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) without permission.

The FSB is Russia’s principal security agency and the main successor agency to the KGB.

Poland’s Gazeta Polska Codziennie daily reported in December that Gen. Janusz Nosek and his successor as the head of the SKW, Piotr Pytel, have been accused of overstepping their powers.

Gazeta Polska Codziennie said that Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service and the FSB struck a deal in April 2010, just after the crash of the Polish presidential plane in western Russia, on cooperation regarding threats faced by either of the sides.

Tusk was Polish prime minister at the time.

The daily said among threats to the FSB were operations by the United States and NATO.

Gazeta Polska Codziennie reported that investigators are probing visits by Russian officers to the SKW headquarters and official trips by Nosek and Pytel to Russia.

It said witnesses reported that FSB officers were able to move freely around the SKW headquarters, while their car was not scanned for spy devices.

Meanwhile, SKW officers were under constant surveillance by the FSB during a visit to Russia, Gazeta Polska Codziennie added.

Poland’s Military Counterintelligence Service is a secret service responsible for the protection of the country against internal threats to national defence, security and the combat capacity of Poland’s armed forces.

(pk)

Source: niezalezna.pl/Gazeta Polska Codziennie/PAP/IAR