Poland scraps probe into air crash that killed president

WARSAW (AFP): Poland’s new government Friday disbanded the controversial commission that had been investigating the Smolensk plane crash that killed then President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others in 2010.

The commission was created in 2016 by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Lech’s twin brother, with the express goal of pinning blame for the crash on Russia, though it never presented any convincing evidence.

The brothers’ Law and Justice (PiS) party has always questioned the findings of an official inquest that the accident was caused by human error and bad weather, instead preferring theories involving a Polish-Russian plot and a mid-air explosion.

The surviving Kaczynski twin was the PiS party’s leader at the time and a hugely influential figure in the conservative government.

For years, the PiS has organized monthly commemorations of the crash, using the occasions to insist on the need to “find the truth.”

“This is the end of lies in the name of the Polish government, the end of spending hundreds of millions of zlotys for activities that have nothing to do with explaining the causes of the tragedy, but a lot to do with politics,” Vice-Minister of Defense Cezary Tomczyk told reporters.

“It is a truly historic moment where the Polish state finally accepts the truth, that the Polish state agrees that it is up to experts to find the causes of the catastrophe, and not politicians,” he said.

The head of the commission, Antoni Macierewicz, accused Donald Tusk, the prime minister at the time of the crash and who has just returned to the position, of “diplomatic treason,” while Jaroslaw Kaczynski has always accused Tusk of being “morally responsible” for the death of his brother.

Macierewicz criticized Tusk for not having managed to repatriate the wrecked plane, something the nationalist government that has been in power for the past eight years also failed to achieve.

The crash’s victims were members of an official delegation en route to commemorate the 1940 mass killings of Polish officers in Katyn by the Red Army, under orders of Joseph Stalin.