Polish purge victims denied rehabilitation

Moscow city court has turned down a plea for rehabilitation filed by relatives of Polish officers executed during World War Two – in 1940 – at the village of Katyn.

An earlier effort to clear the names of the victims of the Stalinist purge was rejected by a lower district court in Moscow.

The court had accepted state investigators' arguments that files and records of the original criminal proceedings which led to the executions were missing, and that bodies recovered from graves had not been identified.
 
According to classified documents revealed in 1992, around 20,000 Polish troops held in Soviet camps were shot dead. Later, Russian president Boris Yeltsin offered official apologies.