Angry Polish farmers dig up Russian pipeline

Polish farmers dug up a stretch of a pipeline carrying Russian gas to Western European markets in protest at low compensation payments, the Polish press reported.

"There are seven families that were digging with shovels," Marek Mazurkiewicz, a farmer in the central village of Kozirog Rzeczny, told the daily Gazeta Wyborcza last week.

The group, backed by the radical farmers' union Samoobrona, had won a court ruling in 2000 nullifying a decision by local authorities to permit the construction of the Yamal pipeline through their farmland.

The farmers put up a "no smoking" sign in front of a large hole where the section of pipeline is located, but said they had no plans to disrupt the gas flow.

The newspaper said that rather than seeking the removal of the pipeline, the farmers were more likely protesting to win higher "right of way" compensation payments from the pipeline operator, which currently amounted to only a few hundred euros.

The Yamal pipeline began operating in 1999 and currently carries about 20 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas from Siberia through Poland to Germany each year.

Europol Gaz, the Polish-Russian group that operates the 682-kilometer stretch through Poland, said it had already obtained new permission to build on the farmland and warned that the farmers' actions were potentially dangerous.

"Any work done directly near the pipeline by unauthorized people may provoke an explosion," company spokeswoman Danuta Tarkowska said.

"We have informed the police of the potential danger, and we can't do anything else," she told Gazeta Wyborcza.

But police said they had to observe the digging from the road and were helpless to stop it because Mazurkiewicz had put up a sign at the entrance of his land saying it was private property.

"We can't go in," a police officer said.