Poland Exhumes Wartime General's Body

Poland has exhumed the remains of the country's World War II leader General W?adys?aw Sikorski for testing aimed at determining whether or not his 1943 death was the result of a foreign conspiracy.

Experts removed the embalmed corpse Tuesday from its tomb in Krakow. The testing is to be completed today and the body reburied Wednesday in the southern Polish city.

General Sikorski died in a plane crash off Gibraltar, after visiting Polish forces fighting with the British against Nazi Germany. The doomed plane plunged into the sea moments after take-off, and the surviving pilot later testified the plane's controls jammed.

Many Poles suspect the general, who led a London-based government-in-exile, was killed on orders from Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Those theorists suspect Stalin wanted the anti-communist general removed to make way for a post-war communist regime in Warsaw.

Other theorists have accused Britain of conspiracy in the crash.

Those critics have theorized that the British saw the general as an irritant to wartime allies Britain and the Soviet Union.

The fatal crash came months after Stalin broke diplomatic ties with the general's exile government following a Polish demand for an international probe of the 1941 massacre of thousands of Polish military officers in western Russia.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and Reuters.