Smolensk crash probe: former FM questioned
PR dla Zagranicy
Roberto Galea
25.05.2017 13:28
Former foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has appeared as a witness in on ongoing investigation into the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk, western Russia, which killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others.
Photo: commons.wikimedia.org/CC0
The case concerns, among other issues, possible negligence by Polish public officials who allegedly did not ask Russian authorities to allow a Polish team to conduct autopsies on the crash victims, a spokesperson for the prosecution said.
“One of the areas of the investigation being conducted by… the National Prosecutor's Office [into the Smolensk catastrophe] is to probe the negligence of duties by public officials and obstruction of proceedings, [including] the failure to perform autopsies on the victims of the Smolensk disaster,” a spokeswoman for the National Prosecutor's Office said on Thursday, adding that Radosław Sikorski was interviewed as a witness.
Polish prosecutors have also called European Council President and former Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to appear as a witness in the case.
In 2011, Russian medical records were called into question, and nine exhumations showed that parts of six bodies had been placed in the wrong graves.
Experts at the time concluded that up to 90 percent of the medical records compiled by the Russians were wrong. (rg/pk)