STRASBOURG, April 16 - RAPSI, Vladimir Yaduta. The European Court of Human Rights has held that the Russian government failed to provide sufficient information to the relatives of the Polish prisoners of war executed in Katyn in 1940.

The relatives of the POWs appealed to the Strasbourg court as they were unsatisfied with the investigation conducted by Russia. The investigation was completed in 2004.

The applicants claimed a violation of Article 3 on the prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, alleging that Russia failed to provide them with information about the fate of the victims and declined to make any requests for such information.

For several decades, the Soviet authorities denied their involvement in the mass execution of Polish POWs and officials in the Smolensk and Kaliningrad regions, Ukraine and Belarus.

In 1944, a Soviet commission headed by a renowned academic accused the German troops of killing the POWs. However, the TASS information agency issued a statement admitting that the Katyn massacre was one of the gravest crimes committed by Stalinism.

According to the declassified memorandum prepared by the KGB chief at the time, about 22,000 military officers and civil servants deported from Poland were executed in a special operation on March 5, 1940 upon the order of the Soviet Communist Party's leaders.