US Ambassador: we don't see anything more we can do about Smolensk investigation
PR dla Zagranicy
Roberto Galea
22.04.2017 15:07
The US doesn't see how more it can help Warsaw in the investigation of the presidential plane crash in Smolensk, western Russia, US ambassador to Poland Paul W. Jones has said.
Photo: commons.wikimedia.org/CC0
“It was such a tragedy for Poland and the Polish people to lose the President, the First Lady. To lose all the 96 people on that plane is something hard for any other country to grasp or understand,” Jones told the PAP news agency.
The plane crashed on 10 April 2010 as it was attempting to land at the Smolensk military airport in western Russia. Poland has reopened an investigation into the crash, but progress is difficult without having access to the wreckage. Warsaw has made dozens of appeals for Moscow to return the plane and the black boxes, but these have not been handed back despite seven years having passed since the incident.
“Foreign Minister [Witold] Waszczykowski did raise this issue and it has been raised in a number of different meetings over the course of the entire time [I have been] here, over the last year and a half,” Jones said.
Jones said that the US provided information to both the previous coalition in Poland, and the current Law and Justice (PiS) government which came to power in late 2015.
“The United States did everything we can to provide assistance and information, which was fairly limited. But we contributed to the original investigation and we ensured that that same information ... we were able to provide was available to Polish authorities after the change of government here. So we don't see anything more that we are able to do. We've provided everything that we had and could provide,” Jones said.
The Polish foreign minister was recently in Washington where he lobbied for assistance in having the wreckage returned to the country with top US officials, including State Secretary Rex Tillerson.
A new commission to investigate the crash was set up by PiS in early 2016.
The party is headed by Jarosław Kaczyński, twin brother of President Lech Kaczyński who died in the crash.
PiS has long challenged an official report into the crash issued by the previous Polish government which cited a catalogue of errors on the Polish side, while also pointing to errors made by Russian staff at the control tower of Smolensk Military Airport.
A Russian report placed all the blame on the Poles.
Despite repeated requests from Warsaw, Russia has refused to return the wreckage of the plane to Poland. (rg)