Inspired by the huge success of shale gas in the United States, Poland is a pioneer in Europe, pressing ahead as other EU countries — like France, Germany and Bulgaria — impose moratoriums over worries that the drilling technique will poison water and pollute the air.

Poland has high hopes of breaking its 70-percent dependence on unreliable imports from Russian supplier Gazprom, create new jobs and cut rising energy prices.

In sparsely populated Szymkowo, Justyna Kulakowska is notably less enthusiastic.

Kulakowska said she doesn’t believe that shale gas — if found— could improve things for the village. The community would be paid “peanuts,” she said, while others get rich.

The soaring 40-meter (130-foot) rig is the tallest construction for kilometers (miles), jutting out from a rural, flat field of patchy trees, not far from a tiny wind farm built two years ago. But Kulakowska fears its impact will be much worse.

“We will have nothing in the end, only the stench, when they go,” said Kulakowska, 33, whose new pink house is just some 200 meters (yards) from the rig, which has towered over the area since March. Her home’s value has already plunged some 30 percent, she said.

“I am concerned for our water, because the village has its own drinking water well,” she said. “They say it is safe, but anything can happen.”

“It would be superb” if no gas is found, she said.

The pro-business government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been fueling hopes of big discoveries, though dreams of reserves that could make Poland self-reliant for centuries have been dampened.

Reserves are far lower than originally forecast, with recoverable reserves between 346 billion and 768 billion cubic meters, according to a government report last month. That is enough to fully satisfy the country’s gas requirements for about seven decades.

Backers point out that rough estimate is based on figures from the 1990s and will likely change as companies reach gas deposits and analyze their commercial viability.

It is still a few weeks before the value of Szymkowo’s deposits, trapped in porous shale rock some 4,200 meters (13,780 feet) underground, can be assessed. The exploratory well is now 2,957 meters (9,700 feet) deep and drilling is progressing at some 7 meters per hour around the clock.

“What we are hoping to find is that this operation will be commercial,” said Phoebe Buckland, of Talisman’s Corporate and Investor Communications.

“But it is early days and we are still in the piloting phase,” she said Thursday, during a visit to the concrete-paved 3-hectare (7.41 acre) site surrounded by fields still muddy after winter snows.

Talisman has drilled two other test wells in Poland and is still analyzing the rock samples to gauge its success.

The extraction calls for large quantities of water laced with chemicals and sand to fracture shale rock and release the gas, a process environmentalists worry contaminates ground water, pollutes the air, and even causes ground tremors. But, the energy companies insist the technique is safe.

“The technology we are using here is completely safe and there is no possibility for any contamination,” said Jadwiga Swiecicka, spokeswoman for Talisman in Poland.

The company held meetings with local authorities and with residents before the drilling and has faced “a mixed approach, often skeptical,” chiefly due to water safety concerns, she acknowledged.

“But there are also many people who see it as a chance for the region, a stimulus, new workplaces and additional income for local firms,” she said.

Standing in his vegetable garden, some 300 meters (1,000 feet) from the rig, Piotr Puacz, a jobless electrician, had no complaints.

“This is the only alternative to coal and oil, running short and rising in prices,” he said. “My dogs and passing cars are more noisy,” he said.

In a few recent cases, Moscow has turned off the taps in price disputes with Ukraine, while this past winter it cut exports amid a bitter cold spell across Russia and much of Europe. Many Poles are deeply resentful of their dependence on Russia, 23 years after rejecting Moscow-backed communist rule.

Puacz hopes that if sufficient gas is found, the exploratory rig will be taken down and the well will be connected to Poland’s network, helping to satisfy demand.

“We should not be buying (gas) somewhere abroad, where others are dictating the terms and the prices,” Puacz said. “We should have our own reserves.”

Without confirming that a CIA site was ever based in Poland, Tusk said that the ongoing investigation is proof of Poland’s democratic credentials and desire for greater transparency.

Poland will “no longer be a country where politicians — even if they are working arm-in-arm with the world’s greatest superpower — could make some deal somewhere under the table and then it would never see daylight,” Tusk said.

The Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper report Tuesday that charges were brought against a former intelligence head, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, for exceeding his powers by depriving prisoners of war of their freedom and allowing corporal punishment.

Tusk said with the knowledge he has of the facts, he would not have brought the charges.

Siemiatkowski has refused to comment, telling The Associated Press he was bound by secrecy on the matter.

Former U.S. intelligence officials have identified Poland, Romania and Lithuania as nations that hosted some of the CIA’s secret prisons.

Former CIA officials have told the AP the prison in Poland operated from December 2002 until the fall of 2003, and that prisoners were subjected to harsh interrogations. The Council of Europe and the United Nations have also said they have evidence the site existed.

Two prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri and alleged al-Qaida facilitator Abu Zubaydah, have been given victim status in the investigation in Poland after claiming they were held in the country and subjected to harsh treatment.

Politicians in Poland have vehemently denied the claims, particularly Aleksander Kwasniewski and Leszek Miller, who were the president and the prime minister at the time the CIA ran the prison.

Poland backed the U.S. as it pursued the so-called “war on terror” after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

One of only four existing female portraits by Leonardo, the oil painting shows a young woman in three-quarter profile wearing a sumptuous low-cut red and blue dress as she holds a white ermine, an animal also known as a stoat. Historians believe the subject was Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, when she was 16 or 17. Da Vinci painted it around the year 1490.

“The painting is 500 years old and has been subject to all the processes of aging,” including journeying between Poland, France and Germany through the wars and uprisings of the 19th and 20th centuries, Czop said Monday.

“Still, all things considered, it is in very good condition, thanks to the technology that da Vinci used,” Czop said, noting the master painted on durable wood.

More state-of-the art and noninvasive tests — such as computer tomography — are to be performed to help experts decide what kind of maintenance the masterpiece requires, Czop said. For the past 100 years the painting has belonged to the Czartoryskis, an aristocratic Polish family.

The painting was recently exhibited in the Spanish, German and British capitals but Czop said those trips did not hurt it. Nonetheless, authorities have decided not to let it leave the museum again for at least 10 years.

Two of the 96 bodies were exhumed this week in Poland, following a first such exhumation August. Victims’ families and officials say other victims also have reports riddled with mistakes, and prosecutors say more exhumations are possible.

“There were discrepancies. Evidence gathered in Poland differed from information in the Russian documentation,” said Col. Zbigniew Rzepa, spokesman for the chief military prosecutor’s office. “We had to carry out the exhumations to clarify all the doubts.”

Surviving relatives of the three have been enraged by the faulty autopsy reports, which have added to their private grief. Many also fault the Polish government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk for not being firmer with Russia in demanding greater transparency. This comes amid a sense of indignation that key evidence in the crash — black boxes, the plane wreckage and the late Polish president’s satellite phone — remain in Russian hands.

At one extreme, the flawed autopsies and the sense that Russians are not being fully transparent have encouraged Polish conspiracy theories claiming Russian leaders might have played a role in the downing of Kaczynski’s plane, which crashed in fog after clipping a tree at an airport near Smolensk, Russia, on April 10, 2010.

An official Polish report blamed the fog, pilot error and poor guidance from Russian air traffic controllers.

But Antoni Macierewicz, a conservative lawmaker who heads a parliamentary commission trying to clarify the reasons for the crash, said Friday that he doesn’t believe the official Polish explanation and that other theories need to be explored.

Suspicions center on the fact the plane, a Tupolev-154, was Russian built. Some Poles don’t believe that the plane could have crashed just by clipping a tree, and find it strange that there were no survivors when it was already so close to the ground when it crashed.

“A lack of openness creates conspiracy theories,” said Michael Baden, an American forensic pathologist who has advised some of the victims’ families. “You can’t investigate a major catastrophe in secret.”

Andrei Kovalyov, the head of the Russian Center for Forensic Expertise, which conducted the autopsies, said genetic research and inspections of the bodies were performed to international standard.

“Any discrepancies, if they exist, are likely rooted not in badly performed autopsies but the fact that the bodies were fragmented,” Kovalyov said. “When remains of the numerous victims get mixed up inside the cabin there can be problems regarding the attribution of body parts.”

Many Poles easily accept the Russian explanation and see no need for the exhumations, feeling that it doesn’t change the larger picture of the tragedy.

Tusk, the prime minister, said it’s hard to expect perfect reports given “what state the bodies were in after the crash.”

The first victim to be exhumed, the late conservative lawmaker Zbigniew Wassermann, had an autopsy report that was largely incorrect, and described organs that had been surgically removed years before, Macierewicz said.

For instance, the 60-year-old had only a part of his liver left, but his report described it as being the entire healthy liver of a young man, Macierewicz said.

“The document from the Russian autopsy was taken out of the blue,” said Wassermann’s daughter, Malgorzata Wassermann. “It disagreed with the facts: It described things that did not exist and did not describe things that were there.”

His new autopsy, carried out in August, corrected the record but did not change the larger conclusions about the cause of his death, said Col. Ireneusz Szelag, a spokesman for prosecutors.

Another lawmaker, Przemyslaw Gosiewski, was exhumed on Monday. The Russian autopsy report described him as 1.8 meters tall (5 foot 9), when in fact he was 20 centimeters (nearly 8 inches) shorter, according to the law firm representing the family.

The report also failed to mention bone defects resulting from childhood polio.

“Glaring irregularities in the documentation mean there can’t be certainty if an autopsy was even carried out,” said Rafal Rogalski, the Gosiewski family lawyer.

In the case of the third exhumation, family members of Janusz Kurtyka, the head of a state historical institute, doubt that an autopsy was performed because they saw no marks on his body indicating a post-mortem, Szelag said.

Andrzej Melak, the brother of another victim, Stefan Melak, told the parliamentary commission Friday that the Russian documentation was 25 centimeters off in describing his brother’s height.

Melak said he felt at a loss, and criticized the Polish government for not demanding more from Russia. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Our government doesn’t care about Polish citizens.”

Families are also angry because the new autopsies have been perfomed by state experts and they are not allowed to do their own.

Lech Kaczynski was a deeply patriotic leader who was skeptical of Russia, a historic foe that invaded Poland’s eastern half during World War II and controlled the country during the Cold War. Most of the people traveling with him were political allies who shared his views, so it’s no surprise their families would voice distrust in Russia after the crash.

The presidential delegation was traveling to honor 22,000 Polish officers murdered by Josef Stalin’s secret police at the start of World War II in the Katyn forest and other locations. That symbolism only added to the national grief and to the suspicions.

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Associated Press writer Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.

Sobiepan, a Wroclaw Fine Arts Academy student whose last name means “his own master,” said he was inspired by the elusive British graffiti artist known only as Banksy. His own painting is small, white and green, and partly uses swine leather to show a drooping acacia leaf.

On Dec. 10, Sobiepan put it up in a room with contemporary Polish art when a guard at the museum was looking the other way. Museum officials didn’t notice the new painting for three days.

Museum director Mariusz Hermansdorfer told TVN24 on Wednesday that the action revealed some security breaches, but that he also considered it a “witty artistic happening.”

“It has shown that the young generation of artists, unlike their predecessors, wants to see their works in museums,” Hermansdorfer said.

The museum has kept the painting on display — in its cafe. It will be offered for sale at Poland’s biggest charity auction on Sunday.