Malopolskie

17th February 2012

Bozena T. was remanded in custody for three months by Krakow Regional Court for the murder of her 34-year-old daughter and 14-year-old granddaughter. The woman has admitted the crimes and also shown police the murder weapon.

Police were called to the family house in Slomniki on Monday afternoon by the 83-year-old great-grandmother, who lives in an annex on the ground floor and who was worried about the seeming disappearance of her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter from the upstairs portion of the house.

Officers entered the area inhabited by the three women and found the bodies of the youngest two women and arrested the grandmother. On Tuesday prosecutors charged the retired accountant with two counts of premeditated murder, killing the two women with repeated blows with a blunt instrument.

It appears the killings were the result of a long-standing conflict, going back to 2010, when the 36-year-old woman quit her job in a lawyer’s company in Germany and returned to the family home. The rows centred on how the mother was raising her little girl - the grandmother accusing her of being over-protective, for example, forbidding her from using the Internet.

The grandmother was depressed, and concerned the child may be taken into care, so apparently decided to kill both her daughter and granddaughter and then herself. The 14-year-old was reportedly asleep when she was killed. The woman now faces life imprisonment, and her 83-year-old mother has been left totally without family to care for her.

The weasel has landed

Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece ‘Lady with an Ermine’ has arrived back in Krakow and is not going anywhere for at least the next ten years. For the last three years the painting has led a peripatetic existence, travelling from Madrid, to Berlin, to London.

“The painting was transported to Poland this Wednesday evening on a chartered plane,” Katarzyna Bik, press officer for Krakow State Museum told reporters. The details of the flight were kept secret for purposes of security.
“I received a text message on Wednesday evening saying ‘the weasel has landed’, so I had a celebratory glass of wine, then went to bed,” joked the museum’s director, Zofia Golubiew.