AviationNew inquiry into 2010 Smolensk plane crash suggests collusion between governments of Poland, Russia

A new Polish commission, set up to investigating anew the 2010 plane crash which killed President Lech Kaczyński and ninety-five others, has released its report, accusing the previous investigative commission, which did its work in 2011, of doctoring evidence and documents and manipulating facts.

The plane carrying the Polish president crashed near Smolensk airport in western Russia in Poland’s worst air disasters since the Second World War. In addition to the president, senior government and military officials were among the dead.

Kaczyński pursued anti-Russian policies, and his supporters believed that the Russian military, on Putin’s orders, shot the plane down. The disaster strained the already tense relations between Poland and Russia.

The earlier investigation was conducted by a commission appointed by Donald Tusk, who was then Poland’s prime minister and is now the head of the European Council, the EU governing body. The 2011 team concluded that the crash was the result of Polish pilot error, poor guidance by Russian ground controllers in dense fog, and poor visibility at the rudimentary military airport where the plane was attempting to land.

Russian experts conducted their own investigation, concluding that the Polish crew made several mistakes, and that the presence of a Polish air force commander in the cockpit, who, the Russians said, ordered the inexperienced crew to land in the ill-lit military air base despite the severe weather conditions.

The plane was carrying the Polish dignitaries to commemorative ceremonies honoring hundreds of Polish officers killed by the KGB in the Katyn Forest toward the end of the Second World War.

The new inquiry commission was set up by the current nationalist government, in which the main partner is the populist Law and Justice party led by Kaczyński’s twin brother, Jarosław Kaczyński, who has blamed the crash on a collusion between Tusk and Putin.

The Business Standard reports that the new investigative team, appointed by Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz, last Thursday announced its preliminary findings, charging that the 2011 Polish report was the result of “falsifying, manipulating, avoiding, and hiding” the truth.

“Some of the elements were tampered with,” the commission head, Wacław Berczyński, said.

Kazimierz Nowaczyk, a member of the commission, alleged that three seconds had been cut from one of the black-box recordings, while five seconds were deleted from the other box.

The new commission also showed secret footage in which the chair of the 2011 commission, then-Interior Minister Jerzy Miller, suggests to members of the commission that their findings should be in line with the Russian report’s findings to avoid any questions about inconsistencies and “conspiracy theories.”

Berczyński said some of the evidence provided by Russia was doctored. The commission also said that Russia delayed handing over the flight recorders – and pointedly noted that Russia has so far refused to return the plane’s wreckage, claiming – six years after the crash – that it still needs the evidence for its own criminal investigation, even though.

Experts who worked for the 2011 team dismissed the new investigation’s findings.

“These are just words,” Maciej Lasek, head of the committee for investigation of national aviation accidents (the Polish equivalent of the U.S. NTSB), told Polish channel TVN24. He also told the Russian news agency Tass that there were no deletions of missing recordings in the black-box recordings.

The accusations of rigging results are due to “an absolute lack of understanding of the principles of the black boxes and the synchronization of data,” he said.

“The main problem of this group is none of its members have ever investigated air accidents,” Lasek said, noting that “none of the new investigators visited the accident site” in Smolensk.