A Polish prosecutor shot himself today in dramatic footage caught on film in his office after cutting short a news conference.

Mikołaj Przybył during the conference

At the start of the conference at his office in Poznań, Colonel Mikołaj Przybył said: ‘During my entire service as a civilian and later military prosecutor, I have never brought shame to the Republic of Poland and I will protect the honour of an officer of the Polish armed forces and prosecution.

‘Thank you, please give me a five-minute break, I need to rest,’ Przybył said, as the reporters then leave the room.

Mr. Przybył had been defending his office’s probe seeking to reveal the sources of leaks to the media from a continuing criminal inquiry into the April 2010 plane crash in western Russia that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others (New president of Poland).

The prosecutor’s unit didn’t get a court order before seeking phone records from journalists, Polish media reports said.

At the briefing, Mr. Przybył, a lawyer whose military rank corresponds to that of a colonel, took about a quarter of an hour to read a statement dismissing allegations that his office acted in violation of the law while trying to identify the source of leaks from the crash inquiry. He said he had wanted the leaks to stop because they had irked Russian prosecutors, who had shared information with Poland from the Russian inquiry into the crash.

Military and civilian prosecutors appeared divided over the statement Mr. Przybył had made in his defense. Poland’s Prosecutor Generał Andrzej Seremet said Monday that some of the actions the military prosecutors took had lacked legal grounds.

Krzysztof Parulski, Poland’s chief military prosecutor, said civilian prosecutors shouldn’t comment publicly on the work of their military counterparts.

Nearly two years after the crash of the Polish government plane in which Mr. Kaczyński died, criminal investigations in both Poland and Russia continue. A Moscow-based committee of investigators has pointed to an error by the Polish pilots. A commission led by the Polish interior minister agreed that numerous mistakes had been made by the Polish side before and during the flight, but insisted last year that Russian air-traffic controllers had made blunders that contributed to the crash (Poland releases report into 2010 plane crash).

Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said in a statement he was ‘concerned’ about the suicide attempt and asked the head of the national security bureau to monitor the situation.

Some lawmakers are calling for a special parliamentary probe into the case.

Do następnego razu… (Till next time…)