In Poland, the commission to investigate the crash of Kaczynski’s plane was dissolved

The Minister of National Defense of Poland, Władysław Kosyniak-Kamysh, dissolved the subcommittee on the re-investigation of the Tu-154 crash near Smolensk. In 2010, the president of the country, Lech Kaczyński, died in this plane crash.

According to the statement of the Ministry of Defense of Poland, members of the subcommittee must “regulate all documentation, real estate and equipment used for the work of the subcommittee by next Monday, December 18.” The members of the subcommittee also have all their powers revoked.

The department added that a special group will be created soon to analyze all aspects of the liquidated subcommittee’s activities.

Deputy Minister of Defense Cesary Tomczyk said that the liquidation of the subcommittee means “the end of spending hundreds of millions of zlotys on activities that have nothing to do with finding out the causes of the Smolensk disaster.”

• On April 10, 2010, a Polish Tu-154 plane crashed near Smolensk, killing 96 people. Among them was the country’s president, Lech Kaczyński.
• Immediately after the disaster, a state commission was created in Poland to investigate its causes under the leadership of the then Minister of the Interior, Erzya Miller. According to the commission’s report, the plane caught a wing on a thick birch while descending, lost control, overturned, collided with the ground and caught fire.
• In 2015, the second special commission established by the Ministry of Defense of Poland began its work. In 2017, the commission reported that it found a recording of the explosion on the flight recorder. Later, on the basis of the report of an expert in the field of aviation accident investigation, Frank Taylor, the commission came to the conclusion that the left wing of the plane was destroyed by an explosion from the inside; that there were several sources of detonation; that the tree that the airliner collided with during the fall was not the cause of the initial destruction of the wing.
• The Russian authorities cited pilot error as the cause of the crash.

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