Speaking at a press conference in the Polish parliament on Monday, Antoni Macierewicz said that the plane broke into small pieces not due to a collision with the ground, but because of explosives planted on the plane and detonated "as a result of foreign interference."
Despite the official dissolution of his team in December by the Polish defense ministry, Macierewicz declared that the group continued its work, analyzing materials "overlooked" by official investigations.
On April 10, 2010, the crash of a Polish government plane near Smolensk, western Russia, claimed the lives of all 96 people on board, including then-President Lech Kaczyński and his wife.
Those on board were en route to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre in which the Soviet secret police executed thousands of Polish officers taken prisoner during the early months of World War II. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves. Russia continued to deny the war crime for decades.
A State Commission on Aircraft Accidents Investigation, commonly known as the Miller Commission, in 2011 attributed the disaster to the aircraft descending below minimum altitude, resulting in a collision with trees.
Macierewicz's investigation into the Smolensk disaster has been marked by controversy and political positioning.
Following a restructuring of the prosecutorial system by the conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) government in 2016, the investigation was transferred from the Military District Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw to the National Public Prosecutor's Office.
Macierewicz, who was defense minister from November 2015 to January 2018 under the PiS government, in 2016 established a subcommission to reexamine the crash, challenging the conclusions of the Miller Commission.
In April 2022, a report by Macierewicz's team alleged that the crash was the result of "unlawful interference by the Russian side," a claim that was met with significant criticism outside his conservative party.
Maciej Lasek, a former head of the State Commission on Aircraft Accidents Investigation and a member of the now-governing Civic Coalition (KO), criticized the report as a "pseudo-report" and highlighted the substantial public funds spent on the commission's work.
The subcommission led by Macierewicz was disbanded on December 15, 2023, shortly after Donald Tusk's centrist government came to power, with a special team formed within the defense ministry to review its findings.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP
