WARSAW (Reuters) -A military object found in a Polish forest was probably not fired from abroad and most likely belonged to the Polish army, private broadcaster RMF FM reported on Thursday.
RMF, which did not identify its sources, said authorities believed the object could be part of an air-to-surface missile, measuring several metres, which was stuck in the ground.
The defence and justice ministries did not identify what had been had found near the city of Bydgoszcz, beyond describing it as a “military object”.
They also did not say how long it had been there.
Footage from private news channel TVN24 showed a digger accompanied by a truck belonging to bomb disposal experts driving down a forest trail to the scene.
Military police and fire brigade vehicles were present.
RMF said that its sources had noted that fighter jets were repaired near the site, which was near an airport used by the military.
“The Military Department of the District Prosecutor’s Office in Gdansk, under the supervision of the National Prosecutor’s Office, initiated proceedings regarding the remains of an aerial military object found in a forest several kilometres from Bydgoszcz,” Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro said on Twitter.
The defence ministry said the situation did not threaten residents’ safety.
Poland has been on alert for possible spillover of weaponry from the war in neighbouring Ukraine, especially since two people were killed near the border last November by what Warsaw concluded was a misfired Ukrainian air defence missile.
The area where the object was found is hundreds of kilometres from Poland’s borders with Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
The military police, regional police, the mayor of the village of Zamosc, the Gdansk prosecutor’s office and a government spokesman all declined to comment further.
(Reporting by Pawel Florkiewicz, Anna Koper, Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, writing by Alan Charlish; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Bernadette Baum, Peter Graff)
