Investigation into Yak-40’s landing at Smolensk Airport closed
SCND March 12, 2015
The slandered Polish pilots cleared of all charges.
Lieutenants Artur Wosztyl and Rafał Kowaleczko, the pilots of Yak-40, who landed at Smolensk Airport on April 10, 2010 with journalist on board (before Polish Air Force One) , have every reason to be satisfied. The military prosecution decided that the pilots did not put Yak’s passengers’ safety at risk.
wPolityce.pl confirms that the investigation led by the Warsaw District Military Prosecution regarding the negligence causing imminent danger of an air crash has been closed. The legal proceedings were initiated after the Air Force Commander accused Lieutenant Wosztyl (the captain), Lieutenant Kowaleczko (the first officer) and officer Remigiusz Muś (the on-board technician, who in 2012, according to investigators, committed a suicide) of landing below the minimum meteorological conditions, with cloud ceilings lower than 100 m and visibility below 1000 m.
After interviewing the accused pilots and many other witnesses, including Pavel Plusnin, a Russian lieutenant colonel, who on April 10, 2010 was a chief air traffic controller at Smolensk Airport, the prosecution issued a decision to close the investigation due to lack of evidence for the criminal act.
According to the statement explaining the decision to close the investigation, “There is no sufficient evidence that the pilots of Yak-40 (PLF 031) made an approach to landing at Smolensk North Airport on April 10, 2010 at 7.15am below the minimum meteorological conditions, which, for Lieutenant Wosztyl were cloud ceilings at minimum of 100 m and visibility 1000 m, and that the captain was aware of and acted against the command from the Air Traffic Controller at Smolensk North Airport to stop the landing approach and go around.” The prosecution emphasized that any doubts would be determined in favor of the pilots.
Remigiusz Mus, the flight engineer on Yak-40 whose landing immediately preceded PLF 101 and whose testimony implicated the Russian flight controllers, died of suicide.
This rounds out the death of the entirety of key witnesses whose testimonies could prove that the flight controllers bore at least partial responsibility for the mysterious crash that killed the Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others near Smolensk, Russia, on April 10, 2010.
Suicide. So says the Polish Prosecutors office under the administration of Donald Tusk, Bronislaw Komorowski, and the Civic Platform party (Platforma Obywatelska, PO) - the people who came out on top following the disaster of Flight PLF 101. The position of the Prosecutors office is that the autopsy indicated death by hanging with no defensive wounds and and alcohol level of one permille (.01%).
General Konstantin Anatolyevich Morev, chief of the Federal Security Services (FSB), successor to KGB, office in Tver, who interviewed the Russian flight controllers, died at the end of August 2011. His body was found in his office. The official cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound from his service revolver. Read more here
"Russian Image Management"
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.
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