Poland says it has discovered a recording of an explosion aboard crashed Kaczynski’s plane
On Saturday, during a meeting with the representatives of Polish media, Polish Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said that the commission to investigate the Tu-154 crash that killed the country's President, Lech Kaczynski, found a recording of the explosion on one of the recorders.
During the meeting, the Defense Minister was asked about the progress of the investigation of the plane crash near Smolensk on April 10, 2010.
"We’ve identified the moment of explosion in a flight recording. It has already been recognized," Polskie Radio quoted Macierewicz as saying. "We are currently engaged in its analysis and are ruling out all other possible interpretations of this electronic record," he added.
The Minister emphasized that the report, which would not only outline the conclusions of the commission, but also identify those responsible for the catastrophe near Smolensk, will be presented to the public before the end of spring next year.
In August, a representative of the Polish governmental subcommittee that is investigating the causes of the accident said that traces of the explosion were found on the left wing of the airliner that had crashed near Smolensk.
The Tu-154 aircraft, which transported Polish President Lech Kaczynski and other high-ranking Polish officials, crashed near Smolensk on April 10, 2010. During the crash, all 96 passengers aboard were killed.
In 2011, the Committee for the Investigation of National Aviation Accidents of Poland came to the conclusion that the aircraft had descended below the minimum altitude at excessive speeds in poor visibility and rammed into a tree.
After Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice political party’s accession to power in 2015, it was decided to conduct a new investigation into the accident. Since then, the Polish authorities have made repeated statements in favor of the explanation that there was an explosion on board the plane. However, the Polish commission had not disclosed any new arguments.
In August, the Russian Investigative Committee commented on the statements of the Polish authorities about the discovery of traces of an explosion on the wing of the crashed Tu-154. "When carrying out ballistic and explosive technical testing by experts immediately after the catastrophe, no signs of an explosive impact on the plane have been discovered," the official representative of the agency, Svetlana Petrenko, said at the time. She stressed that the Polish experts had established back in 2011 that the crash of the Tu-154 was caused by a collision with a birch tree. "It is absolutely unclear what these new conclusions by the Polish experts are based on," the representative of the Russian Investigative Committee emphasized.