Polish Man in Court for Prank Against PM

A Polish man who linked the Web site of President Lech Kaczynski to a pornographic search has gone on trial for defaming the head of state.

The defendant, identified only as Marek M., acknowledges that he arranged for the president’s site to come up in a search involving male sexual organs, The Telegraph reports. But he says that he was only checking whether his home-designed software worked and had no intention of defaming the president.

Marek M., who lives in Cieszyna in southern Poland, did his work on his home computer and made no attempt to conceal his electronic address, investigators said.

But prosecutors said that he knew what he was doing.

“The word that he used has been for quite some time as an insult, and you don’t need to be a language expert to know this,” a spokesman said.

Poland’s defamation law has been used several times recently. A homeless man who yelled drunken complaints about Kaczynski to a police officer was charged last year, and a member of parliament was cleared of insulting the president by suggesting he had a drinking problem.

The rotund Kaczynski has also ordered an investigation into a German magazine that called him and his twin brother, the former prime minister, “potatoes.”