The sub-committee appointed to investigate the Smolensk plane crash in 2010 has determined that the crash was caused by an explosion on the left side of the presidential plane, Antoni Macierewicz, Poland’s former defense minister and deputy head of Law and Justice (PiS) has revealed.
Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Macierewicz explained the sub-committee had analyzed the history of the Smolensk flight through detailed simulations to understand just how it hit the ground. They also studied the way the wreckage and bodies were strewn around the site of the crash.
“The main and undisputed evidence of Russian involvement was the explosion in the left wing of the place which occurred before the plane hit the trees. The committee has defined the place and time of that explosion and how a second explosion occurred in the center of the plane,” informed Macierewicz.
The former defense minister underlined that the sub-committee benefited from extensive research in Poland and the USA which discovered traces of explosives on samples taken from the wreckage of the plane. This is why he called the crash an “act of unlawful interference.”
The sub-committee report invalidates the state report on the crash prepared in 2011, which ruled that the plane crashed as a result of its left wing clipping a birch tree causing the plane to flip and hit the ground.
The sub-committee has been harshly criticized by the opposition and some family members of the victims, and had been marred by the resignations of its experts who criticized the way the body had been run over the last six years, which included exhumations of the victims’ bodies.
The Smolensk tragedy of 2010 in which 96 people were killed, including Poland’s President Lech Kaczyński, was also investigated by the Russian MAK investigators who blamed the crash on pilot error and ruled out any mechanical cause or air traffic control errors.
