Missile incident case. Police received a call from an army officer about an "air incident" and dispatched a patrol

Poland's main opposition party said on Friday the defence minister should face criminal charges for dereliction of duty, after the latter accused the army of failing to inform the government about a possible missile heading towards the country in December.

Civic Platform MP Paweł Olszewski was the first to inform about the police had indeed received a report regarding an "air incident" on Dec. 16, 2022. "The patrol did not find anything. The intervention was not confirmed. It was ended as unconfirmed. The military itself did not verify and did not carry out searches," Olszewski wrote on Twitter.

He added that the report was called in by "a certain lieutenant colonel". "He would not tell anything more to the police duty officer. There are recordings of these conversations."

Sources in the Main Police Headquarters have confirmed to the tvn24.pl portal the information about the military reporting an "air incident" on Dec. 16, 2022. According to our findings, the police in Nakło nad Notecią received a call from an military officer in the rank of lieutenant colonel who briefly told the duty officer that there had been an" air incident" and that an "unidentified flying object" could have fallen down. Our sources also told us the military man had not mentioned a missile.

"The soldier pointed at a very large area, between Kruszyn and Białe Błota, quite remote from the place where the remains of the missile were actually found," our source told us on the condition of anonymity.

When in April a passerby discovered the remains of the object - most likely of a Russian missile - close to the village of Zamość near Bydgoszcz, the police returned to the case of the telephone report from Dec. 16, 2022.

"The control department examined the duty officer's conduct. He dispatched a patrol, but the terrain was too vast to penetrate and more precise information from the military would not come in the following days and months," the police officer said.

Polish media recently reported that a military object found in a forest in northern Poland in April was a Russian KH-55 missile.

Defence Minister Mariusz Błaszczak said on Thursday an inspection he requested after the object was found showed that Armed Forces Operational Command had received information from Ukraine about a possible missile heading towards Poland but failed to take appropriate action.

Cezary Tomczyk of the opposition centrist Civic Coalition party told reporters Błaszczak was deflecting blame for the incident onto the army.

"Today we will submit a notification to the prosecutor's office about a possible crime committed by Minister Błaszczak in connection with failure to fulfil his duties," said Tomczyk, a member of the opposition centrist Civic Platform party.

Błaszczak, a high-ranking PiS member who has been tipped as a potential successor to leader Jarosław Kaczyński, also said the inspection showed failures in how the search for the object was conducted. He said that personnel or disciplinary decisions would be made after consultation with President Andrzej Duda.

Poland's National Security Bureau said in a statement that on the basis of the information Duda currently had there was no justification for making changes in the military high command. It added Duda had still not received the conclusions of the inspection.

In a statement which did not refer directly to Błaszczak's comments, Operational Commander of the Armed Forces Branches Lieutenant General Tomasz Piotrowski called on Poles to remain united in the face of the threat from Russia.