Masked man with a knife and a gas pistol hits an organiser and is detained at the tribunal protest, as police admit officers did go inside the building at 2:30 a.m.

The crowd defending Poland's Constitutional Tribunal had an armed stranger in its middle on Saturday morning. The Warsaw police said that at about 11 a.m. one of the organisers of the gathering outside the tribunal spoke to a man whose face was covered by a balaclava. When she asked him to uncover his face, the man hit her and ran. Other people at the gathering tried to catch him, but the 30 year old broke free and kept running.

Officers guarding the gathering detained him. The police said the man carried a knife, a gas pistol that fires pellets, and a badge marked "Security" shaped like a police badge, and that officers also found drugs on him. Officers took him to a police station and began their procedures with him there. The police have not named him and have not said what charges, if any, he faces.

A journalist at the scene gave a rougher picture of the flight. Wojciech Parol of Kanal Zero said the man ran straight into the channel's cameraman, pushed him and the camera, and knocked the cameraman to the ground, while people around them shouted "prowokator," provocateur. Parol said the man then ran toward the police. Kanal Zero's account matches the police account on the man's weapons: Parol said people at the scene learned afterwards that the man had been armed, and thanked plain luck that the incident ended with a fall and a chase and nothing worse.

The Warsaw police put the detention in a wider statement about their work around the tribunal. They said their officers used no batons and no hand held gas sprays while they guarded the area, and that officers carried out their legal duties to protect the people inside the building, the people gathered in front of it, public order and property.

In the same statement, the Warsaw police also gave a fuller account of the night inside the building. On Friday the police said officers had stayed on the grounds and had not entered the tribunal itself. On Saturday the Warsaw police said officers did go inside once: at about 2:30 a.m., a prosecutor who was at the scene ordered officers to check the identities of named people who were in the building. The police said that after officers established who those people were, the people left the tribunal headquarters on their own, without any officer intervening, and that those checks were the only police action inside the building, carried out on the express order of an authorised body.

Bogdan Swieczkowski, the tribunal president whom Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska suspended on Friday, spent Saturday morning arguing for talks from outside his own court. On Television Republika he said the judges he calls the tribunal's legal judges were travelling to Warsaw and that he hoped to meet six of them at about 11 a.m. to noon "to restore a legally functioning Constitutional Tribunal." He said he wants to calm the mood and try to talk to the other side, and he warned them at the same time that they should know they could face sentences of many years in prison in a few months or a dozen months. Asked about a settlement, he said he remains hopeful, but he added that after Friday's events the will for any compromise or agreement had, in his words, essentially collapsed.

President Karol Nawrocki's meetings with the parliamentary leaders at the Presidential Palace began at 1 p.m., as his chief of cabinet announced in the morning. No outcome from those meetings had been reported by mid afternoon. Outside the tribunal, the building stands closed under Korwin-Piotrowska's Saturday order, its staff sent home and its filing office shut, and the police hold a masked man who struck one of the gathering's own organisers in front of the crowd that came to defend the court.