The family of an Oxford widow facing extradition on charges she sent a war hero to be executed has said her death means she can finally rest in peace.

The Polish government made repeated attempts to arrest and extradite 89-year-old Helena Wolinska-Brus.

Mrs Wolinska-Brus, who lived in Bardwell Road, North Oxford, was alleged to have masterminded the arrest of Polish war hero General Emil Fieldorf and fabricated evidence in a show trial when Poland was under Communist rule in the 1950s.

However, her death from pneumonia at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital in Novemberhas ended any possibility of her facing trial.

Her son Tamek Brus, of Hawksmoor Road, North Oxford, said: “My mother always denied any involvement in the case of the general and any wrongdoing.

“She said she was the last surviving person who had anything to do with the regime and said on a number of occasions the Polish government tried to make her a scapegoat. The whole thing started 11 years ago and we kept hearing about it on and off but the British Government refused to extradite my mother.”

Mrs Wolinska-Brus, who moved to Oxford in 1973 with her late husband Wlodzimierz Brus, an Oxford University academic, was acc- used of inventing charges that Gen Fieldorf killed Soviet soldiers and Polish Communist partisans The general was a senior commander in the Polish Home Army during the Second World War.

Mrs Wolinska-Brus was also alleged to have arranged for the wrongful arrest of 24 other people while working as a military prosecutor.

Mr Brus, 51, said: “She was a highly controversial person but she was a fighter. She lost her entire family when her parents and brother were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.

“She fought the Germans during the occupation. In the 1960s she fought the Polish Communist government and then ironically she ended up having to fight the democratic government.

“At every stage of her life she seems to have had some enemies which she was fighting against. At least now she can rest in peace.”

Robert Szaniawski, a spokesman for the Polish Embassy in London, said: “Obviously, the whole legal process has been stopped.

“There were many difficulties in extraditing her to Poland and it’s regretted that she has never faced a court.

“The Polish people didn’t want to put an old woman in prison, but everybody wanted her to stand trial.”

cwalker@oxfordmail.co.uk