COMMUNIST Poland sheltered and armed Palestinian extremists in the 1980s, including the founder of Fatah-Revolutionary Council and terrorist mastermind Abu Nidal.

"They had dirty hands,'' General Czeslaw Kiszczak, who served as interior minister in the 1980s, told Poland's TVN commercial television station late on Monday.

"We closed our eyes to the fact that they would come to Poland to rest and for medical attention after attacks and to train for new ones,'' said Kiszczak, who was also the right hand of Poland's then leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski.

According to Kiszczak, Poland also sold them arms.

"It was in the Polish interest to sell them the largest possible quantity of arms,''

Kiszczak said in a TVN program focused on finding traces of Abu Nidal's activities in Poland.

While he was wanted across the globe as the mastermind behind various attacks, Sabri al-Banna, known under the alias Abu Nidal, managed a company in Poland in the 1980s identified as SAS by the TVN report.

Questioned by TVN journalists about General Kiszczak's revelations, General Jaruzelski said he did not recall "such things''.

He also denied any arms sales to "groups linked to terrorists''.

According to Kiszczak, the United States, which tracked down the arms sales, demanded that he expel those involved in them. But according to TVN, some Palestinian militants remained in Poland until 1993.

Believed to be responsible for a string of particularly bloody attacks which claimed at least 900 lives, notably in Europe, between 1970 and 1988, for years Abu Nidal's group was on the US state department list of terrorist organisations.

Abu Nidal died in Iraq in August 2002.