Polish prosecutors may allow exhumation of TU-154M crash victims in future

World April 18, 2016, 17:53

A new group of prosecutors took up the case two weeks ago

WARSAW, April 18 /TASS/. Polish Public Prosecutor General’s Office may consider a possibility of exhuming the bodies of the TU-154M plane crash near Smolensk, Russia, on April 10, 2011, which claimed the lives of 96 people, Polish Deputy Public Prosecutor Marek Pasionek told a news conference on Monday.

Pasionek, who is heading a team of prosecutors investigating the crash of the TU-154M plane of Polish President Lech Kazynski, said that no exhumations were being planned for the moment. However, a new group of prosecutors who took up the case two weeks ago is carefully studying its materials.

"Prosecutors and forensic experts will pass a decision on possible exhumation at a later stage of the investigation," Pasionek said.

"The medical records contain many mistakes on 90% of the crash victims," the deputy public prosecutor said.

According to him, the bodies of 9 crash victims have already been exhumed from their graves. "Prosecutors and forensic experts should consider a possibility of such actions with regards to all the other victims to have an opportunity to establish the causes of death for sure.

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.

"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 in Facebook some time ago. According to him, 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 Smolensk from where they were supposed to go 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. Polish Military Prosecutors’ Office exhumed the bodies of nine Tu-154M crash victims between June 2011 and November 2012. It turned out that 6 out of 9 victims had been buried in wrong graves under different names.

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