Rehabilitation project ready for WWII Katyn victims

“According to anonymous sources within the Interfax news agency, the changes in the law have already been prepared,” Polish Radio's Moscow correspondent Maciej Jastrzebski reported on Monday.

In February this year, Russian ambassador in Warsaw Alexander Alekseyev declared that Moscow would rehabilitate the Katyn victims.

President Dimitri Medvedev appointed a special team of lawyers to handle the matter.

Under Russian law, the process would clear the executed men of any stain on their honour.

Although Moscow officially admitted guilt for the crime in 1990, the process of rehabilitation is normally applied to those unjustly sentenced in court, which provided a stumbling block as there was no court sentence for the Poles, a large portion of whom were reserve army officers.

Previously, in 2004, Russian military prosecutors broke off an investigation into the massacre, citing that rehabilitation was no longer possible because the executioners themselves were no longer alive and that there is no official documentation on the death of each individual victim. (nh/pg)