Polish presidential plane broke up in air: Experts
warsaw — The top investigator of the deadly 2010 crash of a Polish presidential in Russia said on Monday that a fresh analysis showed the aircraft broke up in mid-air before hitting the ground.
The claim comes on the day that Poles mark the seventh anniversary of the crash in Smolensk, western Russia, that claimed president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, mostly senior Polish statesmen.
Poland’s governing rightwing Law and Justice (PiS) party, led by Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw, has long insisted it was no accident.
Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz, who says that the crash was the result of a Polish-Russian conspiracy, last month accused former Polish premier and current EU President Donald Tusk of “diplomatic treason” over an earlier probe into the crash.
After winning power in 2015, the PiS launched a new investigation into the incident, which Polish and Russian investigators earlier attributed to human error and bad weather.
“The plane started to break up and lose parts in the air; they fell to the ground far from where the infamous birch tree was... The tree had no impact on the crash,” Waclaw Berczynski, who heads a team of Polish investigators, told public broadcaster TVP Info Monday.
Berczynski said investigators based their new conclusion on an analysis of a conversation between the plane’s pilots and Russian air traffic controllers on the ground.—