At the 15th anniversary of the aviation tragedy in Smolensk, in which former Polish President Lech Kaczynski and almost the entire political and military leadership of the country were killed, Polish prosecutors are requesting the arrest of 43 Russian forensic experts, whom they accuse of falsifying the autopsies of the victims.
Six investigations are still underway in Poland after the disaster in Russia. Prosecutors continue to search for answers in the case of the 2010 plane crash, which resulted in the death of the then-Polish President and his wife, the entire military command, and a number of Polish politicians who were traveling to participate in a commemoration in Russia.
Prosecutors in Warsaw have discovered that the Russian medical examiners who performed the autopsies wrote false information in their medical reports, even copying and pasting information from one report to another. “We have established beyond any doubt that the forensic opinions regarding the autopsies of the victims of the plane crash, which the Russian doctors prepared for the purpose of investigating the Polish aviation accident, contained a lot of false information,” said lead prosecutor Krzysztof Schwartz, according to the Polish news agency PAP.
He added that it is not clear whether the Russians intentionally falsified the autopsies or if they wrote false information out of “laziness” or “incompetence.” Now, prosecutors are requesting international arrest warrants for the 43 forensic experts involved in the autopsies. The initial conclusions of the investigation showed that the government plane crashed due to errors made by the Polish pilots, but there was also responsibility on the part of the Russian air traffic controllers, who transmitted false information to the crew.