POLISH PRIME minister Donald Tusk has accused opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski of making a “political game” out of the fatal air crash that killed his twin brother.
Warsaw has criticised as partial and incomplete last week’s Russian crash investigation report that placed the blame for the April 10th, 2010 crash in Smolensk entirely on the Polish side.
Mr Tusk has admitted that a large part of the blame lay with the pilot of the presidential aircraft, but said some responsibility lay on the Russian side too. Mr Tusk insisted, however, he would not let the Smolensk incident burden improving ties with Moscow.
“Not everyone has been interested in finding the complete truth about the causes of the disaster,” said Mr Tusk in the Polish parliament, referring to Mr Kaczynski’s Law and Justice Party (PiS). “Nor has everyone been interested in avoiding turning the Smolensk disaster into a disaster in relations between Poland and . . . the Russian Federation.” Mr Tusk criticised those who clung to a “convenient truth” that only Russia was to blame. The “inconvenient truth” was, he said, that blame lay on both sides.
Mr Kaczynski and his allies blame Russia for the crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 other Polish officials. They reject the central finding of the Russian report – that a senior Polish protocol officer in the cockpit of the doomed craft put pressure on the pilot to land in thick fog.
President Kaczynski and his party were en route to a memorial ceremony regarding the massacre of Poles by the Soviets at Katyn, near Smolensk, in 1940.
A Polish government report into the crash will be published next month. Polish investigators accuse the Russian air traffic controllers at Smolensk of providing too little – and at times incorrect – information to the Polish pilots.
“Ground control staff, acting under a lot of pressure, made a series of mistakes and did not sufficiently support the Polish Tupolev attempting to land in extremely difficult weather conditions,” said Col Miroslaw Grochowski.
The Polish officer suggested the controllers were under pressure because of the presence in the tower of the deputy head of the airport, a Russian lieutenant.
