Polish authorities allege that the assailant was a 27-year-old man with a history of crime and mental illness. After he stabbed Adamowicz repeatedly on a stage in front of a crowd of thousands, he declared himself to have been wrongfully imprisoned by Poland’s previous ruling party, which had supported Adamo­wicz.

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The mayor of a Polish city famed for its independent-

minded shipyard workers, who played a critical role in the fall of communism, Adamowicz was known for his pro-migration views, support for gay rights and efforts to fight attempts by Poland’s ruling party to bolster its power over the country’s judiciary. Those issues cut across the grain in a country increasingly dominated by Law and Justice, even as national leaders moved quickly to support the mayor and his family.

“Hostility and violence has brought about the most tragic and painful result,” Polish President Andrzej Duda wrote on Twitter, a day after he wrote that “we usually disagree with Mayor Pawel ­Adamowicz in political views about how Poland should be governed, but today we are with him and his family unconditionally.”

The Polish government sent a plane to London to bring home Adamowicz’s wife, who was in Britain at the time of the attack.

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Polish authorities, who identified the suspect only as Slawomir W., said he had been released from prison recently after serving more than five years for committing a string of bank robberies. They said he had used a press pass to get onto the stage and were investigating how he had obtained it.

Whether the attack was politically motivated was not immediately clear. But Adamowicz’s allies said it was difficult to separate the crime from a broader context of anger, hate speech and calls to violence that has been on the rise in Poland in the three years since Law and Justice took office. Some said they feared the country could become even more split in the aftermath of the murder.

Last year, the far-right All-

Polish Youth organization issued fake death certificates for 11 opposition politicians, including ­Adamowicz, ahead of October local elections. Human rights advocates asked prosecutors to press charges, but authorities said the death certificates were legitimate political speech.

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“In the upcoming days we need to do everything possible in order to save our humanity and in order to save what is good in our society,” Polish Human Rights Commissioner Adam Bodnar said Monday.

Bodnar, who teamed with the mayor on several issues during Adamowicz’s 20-year tenure leading Gdansk, said he was trying to be careful not to point fingers before the motivations behind the crime are known. But he said that it was hard not to think about the broader context.

“If we talk about general trends, then yes, the government and especially the prosecutors’ office was not doing enough to combat hate speech,” he said. “When I see this death certificate with his face which was made by right-wing NGOs, what am I supposed to think?”

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Even before Adamowicz was pronounced dead Monday afternoon, Polish civic groups had planned to hold rallies against hate speech Monday in Warsaw, Gdansk and elsewhere around the country, and these turned into impromptu memorials for the slain mayor. Duda, the Polish president, announced Monday that he would hold a rally Tuesday against violence.

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But some people questioned whether the government has been too passive about threats of violence against opposition figures. Even if the murder was not politically motivated, in Poland’s hothouse atmosphere such violence is no longer inconceivable, they said.