The Dutch report regarding the crash of the MH17 airliner has gathered a huge publicity all over the world, also in Poland. “We now know that the Western methods of a crash investigation differ dramatically from those applied by the Russian Federation,” said attorney Piotr Pszczółkowski who represents a number of Smolensk victims’ families.
The outcomes of the report show undisputedly that the Malaysian airliner was shot down by a BUK missile. The missile’s fragments found at the crash site are the proof, since they were covered with paint of the same color as the standard paint used for BUK missiles. More fragments of the missile were found in the thoroughly examined bodies of the crash victims. The experts dismissed theories such as an explosion inside the aircraft or fire on board. Before the report was published, the experts presented their conclusions to the victims’ families.
The process of informing victims’ families about a crash is a novelty in Poland. The Chief Military Prosecutor leading the Smolensk crash investigation has been famous for publicizing news before making it official. This happened in April 2015, when new CVR transcripts from the Tu-154M were published nearly 5 years after the crash. However, there are many more differences between the way the Dutch and Polish investigations have been led. “Poland has never been in the possession of the key direct evidence. To this day Poland has not recovered the wreckage of the plane from Russia, either black boxes or the crucial ACT recordings,” said Stanisław Piotrowicz, Deputy Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee to Investigate the Smolensk Crash.
Meanwhile, the evidence that Russia withheld from the Polish side has been subject to numerous acts of destruction. The wreckage parts were washed, cleaned and piled outdoors without cover, exposed to the impact of meteorological factors. As reported by witnesses, some parts of the aircraft were simply stolen by locals and sold off as scrap metal. “Polish authorities merely pretended that they undertook legal steps. “It has been 5 years from the crash and the prosecution established very little in the case,” concludes Stanisław Piotrowicz. A majority of Polish experts are in agreement that the works of the Polish Committee for Investigation of Aviation Accidents should be resumed.
More information can be found in the October 15, 2015 issue of Gazeta Polska Codziennie.
Retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Senior Scientific Intelligence officer Eugene Poteat, goes on the record:
"The trip to Smolensk was expected to highlight Russia finally admitting culpability in the massacre, after long having blamed it on the Germans, an atrocity they had tried to conceal for over 70 years.
As for the reception committee, it had different ideas. Putin wasn’t looking forward to such an occasion. Into this poisonous reception brew was President Kaczynski’s well-known public criticism of Moscow and Putin, a habit that has ended the lives of others within Russia – and abroad. A few discouraging Russian requirements – that Kaczynski could not attend in any official capacity – did not halt the Poles. Kaczynski would go anyway on non-official, “personal” business. To Russians, such a distinction would be meaningless, not lessening the possible international excoriation of such an event. A problem ripe for a modern, Russian solution: a tragic, ‘natural’ accident."
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