Smolensk still divides
22:50
Ceremonies took place in Warsaw in yesterday honour of the 96 who died, including President Lech Kaczyński and wife Maria, in the Smolensk air disaster on 10 April 2010. At 08.41 am local time a trumpet played at the Powązki Military Cemetery in the Polish capital, the precise time four years ago when the TU-154 aircraft, carrying politicians, officials and top military brass to a WWII Katyn massacre remembrance ceremony crashed in a field near the Smolensk military airport in western Russia.
The official ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Deputy Prime Minister Elżbieta Bieńkowska and Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz and members of the victims' families.
The other side
At the same time as the official ceremony was under way at Powązki cemetery, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of the Law and Justice (PiS) opposition party and identical twin brother of the late president, attended mass at a church in Warsaw and then gathered with supporters outside the Presidential Palace to pay their respects to the dead.
Kaczyński has rejected official explanations of the cause of the Smolensk air disaster, with reports by both Poland and Russia finding that poor visibility and human error were behind the crash of the TU-154.
Kaczynski and members of his Law and Justice party have referred in the past to the “assassination” of President Lech Kaczynski and a report will be released today by MP Antoni Macierewicz which will claim that an explosion brought down the plane four years ago.
An opinion poll for the Gazeta Wyborcza daily by the Millward Brown pollster found that one-in-four (23 percent) of respondents believe that the death of President Kaczynski was the result of an “assassination” – an increase of six percent from a similar poll on the 3rd anniversary of the disaster.
