Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he believes the fatal shooting of an exiled Russian artist was a politically motivated murder, though he said he was still awaiting evidence and more concrete leads, the news agency PAP reported on Wednesday.
If the murder had been carried out on Russia's orders, it would constitute a serious incident with international implications, he said. "This is state terrorism," Tusk said.
The artist who was shot, a performance artist and caricaturist known by the pseudonym Semyon Skrepetsky, had been a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, Tusk said.
Both the Polish police and the domestic intelligence service had offered Skrepetsky protection, but he had declined it for unknown reasons, Tusk said.
The artist was shot dead on Monday on a public street in the small town of Biała Podlaska near the Belarusian border.
Tusk said two men from Belarus who had been detained were subsequently released. There was no evidence that they had been directly involved in the attack, he said.
