WARSAW (AFP)---Justice authorities in Poland Tuesday said they had issued a European arrest warrant for an 88-year-old British citizen of Polish origin accused of involvement in Stalinist-era show trials.

Polish investigators have already made two failed attempts to extradite Helena Wolinska in 1999 and 2001.

On both occasions British courts turned down the request on humanitarian grounds, citing in particular her age.

Poland has been able to file European arrest warrants, since 2006 as a result of joining the European Union in 2004. The warrants are intended to speed up extradition procedures within the 27-nation bloc.

Contacted by AFP, the British embassy in Warsaw said London had not yet received the warrant and that it could not comment.

Wolinska, who now lives in the southern English town of Oxford, worked as a military prosecutor in Warsaw following the creation of Poland’s communist regime in the wake of World War II.

She is accused of having been behind the wrongful arrest of 24 members of the non-communist resistance, which battled the occupying Nazis during the war but subsequently fell foul of the Soviet army and its Polish communist cohorts.

Among the high-profile resistance figures who crossed Wolinska’s path was August Emil Fieldorf, a general from the underground Home Army (AK). He was executed after a show trial in 1952. His body has never been found.

Wolinska was also behind the arrest of Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. A former inmate of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, he later spent nine years in the communists’ jails.

Bartoszewski is today considered a moral authority in Poland. He was twice foreign minister following the fall of the communist regime in 1989.

Wolinska, who is Jewish, managed to escape from the ghetto set up by the Nazis in Warsaw after they invaded Poland. In 1939, she joined a pro-Moscow communist resistance movement.

After first serving Poland’s post-war Soviet-inspired regime as a prosecutor, in 1956 she became a member of a Marxist institute attached to the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR).

She moved to Britain after a wave of anti-Semitism in Poland in 1968, which was sparked by one wing of the communist party in order to win an internal power struggle. She later became a British citizen.

Wolinska, who could face a 10-year prison sentence if found guilty of communist-era crimes, has always refused to appear before a Polish court.

Last month she told Poland’s PAP news agency that the case was "idiotic" and showed that Polish prosecutors had "nothing better to do".

She also said she could not count on a fair trial in her former homeland, claiming any hearing would be "political" and "anti-Semitic".