Suspected military drone crashes and explodes in eastern Poland, officials say

Local police said they received reports of the crash around 2 am and found burned metal and plastic debris at the scene near the village of Osiny.

A suspected military drone crashed into a cornfield and exploded in eastern Poland early on Wednesday, the country's news agency PAP reported.Local police said they received reports of the crash around 2 am and found burned metal and plastic debris at the scene near the village of Osiny.As a result of the explosion, windows were broken in some houses but nobody was injured, PAP reported."We are tentatively dealing with a military drone. It is most likely that its damage was caused by explosives," Prosecutor Grzegorz Trusiewicz, the head of the Lublin Regional Prosecutor's Office, said.Trusiewicz said military experts were analysing the site to determine the quantity of explosives the drone had been carrying.He said civilian use and smuggling had been ruled out."We have a lot of manpower, we have the army to help us. I hope that we will be able to finish the operation by the evening," Trusiewicz said.Poland's Armed Forces Operational Command said in a social media post that no violations of Polish airspace from neighbouring Ukraine or Belarus had been recorded overnight.Officials initially said the explosion may have been caused by a part of an old engine with a propeller.But Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz later said the object was most likely a drone."We are talking about small objects. Drones are objects that are difficult to detect. For the time being, and I emphasise, for the time being it does not carry signs that clearly indicate a military character," he said.Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than three years ago, there have been a number of incursions into Polish airspace, raising alarm in the European Union and NATO member state and reminding people how close the war is.