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Polish ex-president blames Kaczynski brothers for Tu-154M plane near Smolensk

The crash came as a consequence of irresponsible decisions, "a desire to use the Katyn theme in the election race and for plenty of other reasons," Valenca explained

© Maxim Shemetov/TASS Archive

WARSAW, April 11 /TASS/. Poland’s former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lech Valenca has put the blame for the April 10, 2010 Polish presidential plane crash near Smolensk on the Kaczynski brothers.

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"If the truth wins, I shall bet that the Kaczynski brothers will turn out to be responsible for the tragedy near Smolensk," Valenca, the leader of Poland’s famous Solidarity trade union, wrote on his page in Facebook on Monday. The crash came as a consequence of irresponsible decisions, "a desire to use the Katyn theme in the election race and for plenty of other reasons," Valenca explained.

On April 10, 2010, an official Polish delegation led by the then Polish President Lech Kaczynski flew onboard of a TU-154M government plane to Katyn, a village near the Russian city of Smolensk, to attend the commemorations of the Katyn massacre - a mass execution of Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1940. The pilots decided to land the plane in conditions of bad visibility and the absence of visual contact with the Earth. The plane collided with the trees and then hit the ground. It fell several meters short of the runway at the Smolensk-Severnyi airfield. All the 96 people onboard, including representatives of Polish bodies of state power, military structures and public organizations, died in the crash.

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