Logo Polskiego Radia

Smolensk air crash report ‘falsified,’ prosecutors notified: Polish defence minister

PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki 22.11.2017 12:20
The Polish defence ministry says it has notified prosecutors about a possible crime committed by members of a state commission that investigated a fatal presidential plane crash when the country’s previous government was in power.
The wreckage of the Polish presidential plane shortly after the crash. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/staszewski/CC BY-SA 2.5The wreckage of the Polish presidential plane shortly after the crash. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/staszewski/CC BY-SA 2.5

Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz said that “prosecutors and the court” will determine whether some members of the commission, which was headed by Jerzy Miller after the April 10, 2010 crash, were “responsible for attesting to untrue facts on at least four counts.”

According to Macierewicz, members of the commission lied when they stated “that they investigated the site of the disaster at the scene directly after” the fatal crash near Smolensk, western Russia, which killed all 96 on board, including then-Polish President Lech Kaczyński.

Second, the investigators untruthfully stated that “the black boxes were opened jointly by the Russians and the Poles in Moscow," Macierewicz told broadcaster Telewizja Republika on Tuesday, while this is not true, he argued, “because the main black box -- or the [flight recorder] that is widely regarded as the main one, containing the recordings of conversations between the pilots - was found much earlier and it was the Russians who opened it before the Poles could even catch a glimpse of it," he said.

Third, commission members signed their names under a wrong assessment of the kind of G-force that was at work when the plane hit the ground, Macierewicz suggested. “Both the [Russian] commission headed by Mrs. [Tatiana] Anodina and the [Polish] commission led by Mr. Miller claimed the force was 100G," Macierewicz said, while in reality "members of Mr. Miller's commission themselves say that this could not have been 100G" and have put the figure at "2-9G."

Crash report ‘falsified’

In addition, according to Macierewicz, the official Polish crash report was “falsified” in that it suggested that General Andrzej Błasik, the Polish air force commander, was in the cockpit at the time of the crash and allegedly issued commands to the pilots.

Earlier this year, a new commission investigating the crash said the presidential plane was probably destroyed by a mid-air explosion and that Russian air traffic controllers deliberately misled Polish pilots about their location as the plane was approaching the runway of the Smolensk military airport in 2010.

The new commission to investigate the crash was set up by the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which came to power in 2015.

The party is headed by Jarosław Kaczyński, twin brother of Poland’s late President Lech Kaczyński.

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.

(gs/pk)

Source: PAP

Print
Copyright © Polskie Radio S.A About Us Contact Us