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Russia has no new recordings from Polish presidential plane’s cockpit, embassy says

The Russian president said at the annual news conference last week that any speculation around the Polish presidential plane’s crash should be stopped

© Vladimir Astapkovich/ITAR-TASS

WARSAW, December 28. /TASS/. Russia’s embassy in Warsaw has dismissed as ungrounded the demands of Poland’s National Defense Ministry to hand over the alleged new recordings from the cockpit of Poland’s Tu-154M plane that crashed in western Russia in 2010.

The embassy published a statement on its website on Wednesday in comments to the Polish Defense Ministry’s appeal after the annual news conference of the Russian president on December 23 during which Vladimir Putin answered a question on the April 2010 plane crash.

"There are no grounds for claims that Russia allegedly has a new and earlier unknown recording of talks from the cockpit that the Polish side is requesting now. There are only the recordings that both the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) and the Polish commission had during the investigation of the crash," the embassy said.

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Putin urges to stop speculations about crash of Polish plane near Smolensk

The transcripts of conversations between the pilots have been earlier published officially by the Polish side and local mass media outlets, it said, adding that "there is nothing new."

"Concerning the handing over the debris of the plane to the Polish side, there is no sense in explaining one more time why the Russian investigators need the debris while the investigation is still underway," the embassy said, stressing that the Polish investigators can come to Russia at any time.

The Russian president said at the annual news conference last week that any speculation around the Polish presidential plane’s crash should be stopped and must not be used for fanning tension in the Russian-Polish relations.

The crash of the Tupolev-154M servicing the flights of Polish top state officials that occurred a few hundred meters away from the runway of the Northern airdrome in Smolensk on April 10, 2010, claimed the lives of all 96 people aboard, including the then President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, and a host of Polish military and civilian officials.

The specialists of the Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) came to a conclusion that the crash occurred because of the actions of the crew that took a wrong decision to land in poor weather conditions amid the psychological pressure. The Polish governmental commission named several causes of the crash - the lowering of the jet below the minimal admissible altitude and also the errors of the crew and the fact that the pilot had ignored the signals emitted by the Terrain Awareness and Warning System (TAWS) that prevents a collision with the ground known as a 'controlled flight into terrain'.

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