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PRESS REVIEW: Moscow ‘urged previous Polish gov’t to put pressure on journalists’ over air crash

PR dla Zagranicy
Paweł Kononczuk 06.06.2016 12:54
Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz has said Moscow demanded that Poland’s previous government headed by PM Donald Tusk should “finally do something about” about journalists who suggested the Smolensk 2010 plane crash was not an accident.
Antoni Macierewicz
Antoni Macierewicz Photo: Flickr.com/MEDIA WNET

Macierewicz’s comments about the crash, which killed then-Polish President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others, were cited by Poland’s niezalezna.pl website.

The website cited Macierewicz as saying: “From dispatches and reports [from Polish security services] and ambassadors, it is evident that the Russian side demanded that something finally be done and the problem should be cleared up in terms of the parliamentary team and journalists who indicate… that the Smolensk tragedy occurred as a result of a [pre-planned] attack, because [such reports] disrupt Polish-Russian relations.”

Meanwhile, Tomasz Sakiewicz, the editor-in-chief of the Gazeta Polska weekly, told public broadcaster TVP: "If it turns out that they [the Tusk government] did something… in response to orders, [in response to] Russian blackmail, then we are dealing with treason.”

In 2014, a group of parliamentarians mainly from the then-opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party concluded that the Polish president’s Tupolev 154 plane had been brought down by an explosion.

This was in stark contrast to official Polish and Russian military reports on the causes of the tragedy, which happened in dense fog on approach to a military airfield lacking ground identification radar.

The former report cited a catalogue of errors on the Polish side, while also pointing to errors made by Russian staff at the control tower of Smolensk Military Airport.

The Russian report placed all the blame on the Poles. The wreckage of the plane has never been handed over by Russia to Polish authorities.

Source: niezalezna.pl

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