“I had the constant feeling that if I lied, if I said something bad about Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, the prosecutors would end my detention,” newly released Law and Justice (PiS) MP Dariusz Matecki told reporters on Friday, shortly after walking out of custody.
Matecki spent two months behind bars, a period he calls areszt wydobywczy—literally “extraction detention,” a term Poles use for pre-trial custody applied to squeeze testimony from a suspect.
“The aim was to extract statements that would accuse Zbigniew Ziobro. What happened to me is almost identical to what happened to Anna Wójcik,” he said, invoking another high-profile detainee.
Political vendetta, he claims
Calling Ziobro his “political authority”—“the man who defeated VAT mafias that are now coming back”—Matecki argued that his arrest was driven by “the revenge of Donald Tusk, Roman Giertych and Adam Bodnar” for his earlier activism as an MP, city councillor and head of the Anti-Polonophobia Monitoring Center.
He pointed to the timing: prosecutors sought to prolong his custody until 6 June, five days after the second round of local elections. “I was supposed to be completely cut out of political life,” he said.
Media “mud-slinging”
Matecki compared coverage on commercial network TVN and public broadcaster TVP to communist-era smear campaigns. “I felt like an opposition activist slandered with mud,” he said.
Health, family and “blackmail”
The MP revealed that doctors had discovered “dozens of precancerous lesions” in his stomach two months before his arrest and that surgery had been scheduled. Nonetheless, he was transferred only belatedly to the prison hospital.
He also lashed out at prosecutors for blocking any contact with his mother. “For almost two months they wouldn’t let a son talk to his mother; her letters were hidden in a drawer,” he said, thanking supporters for their solidarity.
“They blackmailed me with zero contact with my family. I constantly felt pressure to give evidence that would implicate Minister Ziobro,” Matecki insisted. “I thought I might sit here for two years. I know what people in this forcibly seized prosecution service are capable of. Adam Bodnar is no longer a human-rights ombudsman—he’s a butcher of civil rights seeking to liquidate the democratic opposition. I’m convinced I won’t be the last MP thrown into detention.”
Matecki’s remarks add fuel to an increasingly bitter dispute between the PiS opposition and the new government over the independence of prosecutors and the judiciary.