Drone that crashed in Poland may have flown from Belarus, Warsaw says
Polish investigators say the drone that crashed and exploded in a cornfield on Wednesday may have entered Polish airspace from Belarus, as services continue to comb the area around the blast's epicentre.
"Adding to the footage that we have, there is a great chance that the object had flown from Belarus," Grzegorz Trusiewicz, head of the District Prosecutor's Office in Lublin, said at a press briefing on Thursday.
He said that services, including prosecutors and the military, have resumed examining the area surrounding the blast and plan to comb the wider area. Investigators are also considering the possibility that the drone may have struck nearby power lines. The prosecutor's office has secured three power lines showing "signs of recent damage."
"Today we will first and foremost describe the items discovered so far," Trusiewicz said, adding that the services will not only search the surface and the centre of the explosion but also dig into the soil.
Hours after the explosion in the corn field sent shockwaves across the country, Polish Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz dubbed the incident "a provocation by the Russian Federation", which deliberately coincided with the Ukraine war peace talks.
Poland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) announced on Thursday that it will send a note of protest to Russia in response to the incident, adding that the tone will depend on whether the defence ministry states that it was a calculated provocation by Moscow.
The incident unfolded overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday, roughly 100 km from Warsaw in the Lubelskie province, eastern Poland. The blast wave shattered windows in buildings close to the crash site.(PAP)
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