Priest's Disappearance Prompts Restraint Plea From Walesa

WARSAW, Poland--Solidarity leader Lech Walesa urged supporters yesterday to avoid being provoked into "bloody revolution" by the kidnapping of a pro-Solidarity priest, who the Interior Ministry says was abducted and possibly killed by three of its own officers.

"We won't let anybody pull us into brawls in which we will lose," said Walesa, contacted by telephone at his apartment in the northern port of Gdansk. "We simply cannot let anybody manipulate us into any situation."

Regret

Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, said he appealed for restraint in a speech to worshipers following a Mass at St. Brygida's Church in Gdansk.

He said he told them the abduction of the Rev. Jerzy Popieluszko, 37, may have been an attempt to provoke the government's opponents.

"If somebody assumed it would be a revolution, I won't give him a bloody revolution." Walesa said. "I am for peaceful evolution."

A captain and two lieutenants of the Interior Ministry have been charged in the Oct. 19 abduction, the interior minister, Gen. Czeslaw Kiszczak, said in a nationwide television address Saturday night.

The captain Grzegorz Piotrowski, said he had killed Popieluszko, but his confession had not been confirmed because the priest's body has not been found, and because the three men made conflicting statements, Kiszczak said.

He said he had no evidence to back up the assertion that the priest had been murdered. Kisczak identified the two other kidnappers as Lts. Waldemar Chmielewski and Leszek Pekala.

Popieluszko, of Warsaw, had been one of the Polish Roman Catholic church's most outspoken defenders of the Solidarity free trade union movement, which was Outer wed under martial law.