Russia Court To Hear Poland`s Katyn Massacre Case

The court ordered that the case be re-considered.

The families of some of the thousands of Polish army officers shot by the Soviet Union in a World War Two massacre won the right on Tuesday to have their case heard in a Russian court, their lawyer said.

Relatives of officers killed in the Katyn massacre, seen in Poland as a symbol of Soviet repression, want the Russian courts to recognise that the victims were killed unlawfully, a step they hope will open the way for the culprits to be identified.

A Moscow district court had earlier refused to consider the relatives' case but on Tuesday the Moscow City Court overturned that decision, said lawyer Anna Stavitskaya.

"The court ordered that the case be re-considered," Stavitskaya told Reuters.

"The families want their relatives to be rehabilitated to make clear that they were not criminals who were convicted by a court and shot ... There has never been any apology and nobody has been prosecuted," she said.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski has described the 1940 massacre at Katyn and two other sites -- in which 15,000 Polish officers, intellectuals and officials were shot and thrown into pits -- as an "act of genocide."

Russia's reluctance to declassify all documents on the massacre has angered Warsaw, clouding relations that have also been tense because of disputes over trade, energy and the U.S. missile shield Poland that may be stationed on Polish soil.

The massacre victims were captured after the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939 under a pact between Adolf Hitler and Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Their killing eliminated a swathe of potential opposition to Soviet domination of Poland.

Advancing Nazi troops found the mass graves, in western Russia, when Hitler later invaded the Soviet Union, but for decades Moscow blamed the Germans for the massacre.

Only in 1990 did the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, reveal that Stalin's NKVD secret police had been responsible. A Russian investigation ended inconclusively after a decade.