Investigation into Smolensk air disaster resumed
Poland's Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz on Thursday signed documents making it possible to resume an investigation into the 2010 Smolensk air disaster.
The investigation will be carried out by a 21-strong sub-committee at the Committee for Investigation of National Aviation Accidents. It will be run by Waclaw Berczynski.
The Polish presidential plane crashed at a military airfield near Smolensk killing 96 VIPs, including then-President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, on April 10, 2010. The Polish delegation was going to Katyn for ceremonies marking the 70th anniversary of the 1940 Katyn Forest mass killings of 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and border guards by the Soviet NKVD.
Having signed the documents, Minister Macierewicz said that nearly six years after the tragedy "we know a lot about the true course of events" but stressed that the scope of negligence that marked the original investigation made it impossible "to get to the truth". Macierewicz declared that the new body would investigate the whole of the Smolensk tragedy.
Defence Ministry Spokesperson Bartlomiej Misiewicz announced later in the day that the first sitting of the committee would be held in early March.
PM Beata Szydlo said that the Smolensk air crash should be finally explained and the sub-committee was necessary. According to Law and Justice (PiS) Senator Jan Maria Jackowski, "Poles have the right to know the truth" and the government should explain the disaster.
MP Rafal Grupinski of the opposition Civic Platform (PO) said that the decision to appoint disreputable "pseudo-experts" to the sub-committee was a sad decision. He stressed that Macierewicz had never stopped using the tombs of the killed for political aims.
Kukiz'15 MPs said that the sub-committee was necessary to seek new evidence which the former committee led by Jerzy Miller did not have access to.
The decision was criticised by the Polish People's Party (PSL) whose leader Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz said that with new myths instead of explanations, the new investigation would only cause much suffering to the families of the victims.
Nowoczesna leader Ryszard Petru said Macierewicz's goal was "revenge and sending a few people to prison" and stressed that the work of the sub-committee would look like a show going on for a year.
Later in the day Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova said that Poland's re-launch of an official investigation into the 2010 plane crash is a sovereign right of Poland. She added that from Russia's side, everything has been clarified.
"This is the sovereign right of Poland, of the Polish people - to know and seek the truth," Zakharova told a news briefing. "I hope that this is not linked to politics. This hope is a faint one, but it still exists," she said. (PAP)
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