WARSAW, July 26 (RIA Novosti) - Russia has handed over to Poland documents related to the 2010 plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and other top state officials, Polish media reported on Thursday evening.
Polish prosecutors have earlier filed two requests for additional information from Russia, the RMF FM radio station said, citing a spokesman for Poland’s chief prosecutor’s office, Mateusz Martyniuk. The first request was about the possible use of the late president’s phone after the fatal crash, and the second sought information obtained from locals who arrived at the crash site shortly after the disaster.
“The documents were handed over to the Polish side this week during a visit by Russian investigators to Poland’s Prosecutor General’s Office,” Martyniuk said.
The Russian-made Tu-154 jet, carrying Kaczynski, his wife and a host of top officials, crashed in heavy fog as it attempted to land at an airfield near Smolensk on April 10, 2010. The delegation was flying to Smolensk to mark the 70th anniversary of the 1940 Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police. All 96 people aboard the plane died.
In its probe into the air crash, the Moscow-based Interstate Aviation Committee said the Polish flight crew was responsible for the accident. Poland, which carried out a separate investigation, partially blamed Russian air traffic controllers.
Russian and Polish investigators carried out a joint investigation from February to March this year in response to speculation that the late Polish president could have been the victim of a conspiracy to blow up his plane with a bomb.
Ireneusz Szelag, head of Warsaw’s district military prosecutor’s office, in June told journalists that tests had not revealed any traces of explosive devices or products of their decomposition on the plane debris. However, Szelag said, the conducted research is “insufficient to make a conclusion of a possibility of explosive changes near the examined objects.”
