Macierewicz: If it wasn't an assassination, then what was it?

We already know that the tragedy was neither caused by pilot error, nor by the birch tree. What we do know is that there might have been explosions aboard the aircraft.
Article by Antoni Macierewicz. Source. niezależna.pl / Translation by Iranda

Please find below the translation of article by Antoni Macierewicz, published on niezalezna.pl news portal on 15 February 2012 (http://niezalezna.pl/26805-macierewicz-jesli-nie-byl-zamach-co)

Note: Antoni Macierewicz, born 3 August 1948 in Warsaw, is a Polish Catholic politician, member of the Polish Parliament, the Sejm, former Minister of Interior, former Vice-Minister of National Defence in the government of Jarosław Kaczyński. Currently Mr. Macierewicz is chairing the Parliamentary Committee set to investigate and to establish the causes of the 2010 crash of the Polish Air Force Tu-154M which caused 96 casualties, including the President of the Republic of Poland, Lech Kaczyński.

Macierewicz: If it wasn't an assassination, then what was it?
By Antoni Macierewicz
Translation by Iranda

We already know that the tragedy was neither caused by pilot errors, nor by the birch tree.
What we do know is that there might have been explosions aboard the aircraft.

As recently as a year ago, hardly anyone believed the Smolensk air crash mystery could be solved soon. The events associated with the tragedy were commonly compared to the Katyń massacre. The number of analogies is overwhelming: arrogance of Russian authorities, open resentment on the part of the Donald Tusk Government, and finally the dessinteresment of the West, confused by the attitude taken by the Polish Government. Despite the above, 24 months after the tragedy, the Parliamentary team supported by patriotic media, anonymous researchers, and foreign and domestic scientists not only managed to discredit the Russian version of events, but also presented the most probable hypothesis of causes and course of events of the crash.

The aircraft was ripped apart by explosions

The events of 10 April 2010 at the Smolensk North Airport are best described by conclusions presented in Report No. 456, produced by Grzegorz Szuladziński's Analytical Service Company. "The most probable cause of the air crash were two explosions immediately before the landing of the aircraft." One of the explosions occurred on the left wing, at approximately half the wing length, causing enormous local damage, and consequently breaking the wing into two separate parts. Secondary effects of this explosion damaged the bindings between the front part of the fuselage and the remaining part of the aircraft body. Second explosion occurred inside the fuselage, causing the total destruction and disintegration of the aircraft. The landing itself (or rather - the fall) in a wooded area, regardless of how unsuccessful it was and what the impact angle was, could not have under any circumstances caused such disintegration of the structure as has been documented."

It has taken our experts a lot of painstaking work to arrive at this conclusion, and not without the need to overcome great resistance, as they found it extremely difficult to accept that Lech Kaczyński and a large part of Poland's elite have been murdered in cold blood. Even though confirmed facts do not impose a decisive political interpretation of events (explosions may have been caused, i.e. by Islamic terrorists), the above conclusion in itself makes the blood curdle in our veins, and its political consequences are enormous.

Also of significance is the brutal political and propaganda campaign continuing since the tragedy, which actually prohibited any investigation into the assassination hypothesis – the hypothesis which under normal circumstances would have been investigated as the most probable one.

For this reason, when approximately a month ago I received the first draft of Report No. 456 by Grzegorz Szuladziński's Analytical Service Company of Sydney, Australia, I focused first on looking for errors in the text. And it has taken me so much time that the Author started to worry that the delay in the publication of his work was caused by fear. And fear it was, indeed. The facts and results of the analysis by Mr. Szuladziński were too similar to the results of earlier investigations, carried out by Professor Kazimierz Nowaczyk and his team, by Professor Wiesław Binienda, and finally by our other experts.

Examination of flight path, the wing and fuselage

The team headed by Professor K. Nowaczyk analysed the recordings from TAWS and FMS systems to recreate the vertical and horizontal trajectory of the flight, and found that the Tu-154M aircraft could never hit the birch tree, as it has flown more than ten meters above it; secondly, the rapid change in flight direction immediately before the crash did not take place close to the tree, but approximately 140 m further down the flight path. The team also found that the aircraft never descended less than 20 m above the airstrip, and that after the "go around" decision, the aircraft ascended to the altitude of 36 m.

And here we arrive at the most important discovery made by Professor K. Nowaczyk, who meticulously examined the flight parameters, registered by the flight recorder and discovered that the flight recorder registered two strong jolts that occurred after the aircraft passed the birch tree. On the other hand, the examination of FMS data indicated that the aircraft disintegrated in mid-air, at the altitude of approx. 15-17 metres, when all navigational equipment went dead after a power failure. Professor Wiesław Binienda, a scientist associated with NASA, proved that the wing could not have been broken off by the birch tree. Experiments carried out at Professor . Binienda's laboratory with the use of NASA research software proved that the wing of the Tu-154M aircraft would have cut through the tree trunk without causing any loss of navigational capability of the aircraft. The reconstruction of aircraft shape during the crash, based on the parts and fragments of the aircraft scattered across the crash site, also pointed at an explosion. These painstaking works, performed by a very small team of people, have made it possible to identify the most probable points where explosions occurred - one on the left wing, and the other in the front left part of the centre wing section.

Witnesses heard explosions

Nearly from the very beginning, other evidence at our disposal indicated that the accident has taken place in mid-air, and had nothing to do with the infamous birch tree. The most important piece of evidence was the testimony of the wife of one of the Members of Polish Parliament who died in the crash, but managed to call his wife in the last seconds of the flight. As early as on 11 April 2010, when testifying at ABW¹ , the woman reported that her husband called her at 09:15–09:30 a.m. and in the message recorded in the voice mail of her she could hear her husband shouting "Asiu, Asiu”² . In the background she could hear the howling of wind entering the aircraft and intensifying screams of terrified people. At the same time, she could hear the sound of aircraft walls breaking apart, making sounds "like snapping waffles." The recording was 3–4 seconds long and despite promises made by ABW it has never been recovered from the voice mail

Lt. Artur Wosztyl, pilot of the Yak-40 aircraft that brought journalists to Smolensk and landed at Smolensk North Airport just 40 minutes before the arrival of the Tupolev aircraft, has an even more emphatic memory of the crash. Lt. Wosztyl was standing on the tarmac close to his aircraft, at the distance of approx. 300 m from the tragic crash site, when he heard "the Tu-154M engines suddenly reduce power, followed by cracking and rumbling noises, and detonations. Then the only sound that could be heard was the sound of dying engines. And all fell silent. The reports of other witnesses are either identical or very similar. Most of the witnesses reported hearing detonations, and some also saw a flash of explosion around the flying aircraft.

Questions to Donald Tusk³

After Mr. Szuladziński sent us his analysis, proving that the deaths of Lech Kaczyński and all members of the delegation were caused by an explosion, these facts could no longer be neglected. All these reports and findings results point at this sole, cohesive explanation of the course of events. The report by Grzegorz Szuladziński is, of course, still only a hypothesis that needs to be verified against the results of examination of aircraft wreckage and original flight recorder data.

I doubt, however, whether any of it will be possible as long as Donald Tusk remains in power. It is difficult to avoid here the question why the Government, despite having an argument as strong as the Agreement of 1993 on the principles of mutual air traffic of military airships of the Republic of Poland the of the Russian Federation within the airspace of both countries, resoled to hand-over the investigation into this tragedy to Russians, and why isn't the Government doing anything to recover the wreckage, flight recorders, and the satellite telephone of the dead President? And why didn't the Government allow American forensic experts, invited by families of victims, to participate in post-mortems? Why were Polish prosecutors penalised for making attempts at contacting American services to help explain the tragedy? And, finally, why did the Tusk Government reject all US, NATO and EU proposals concerning the participation of their experts in the investigation into the crash? Why did the Spokesman of the Polish Government refer to the talks with US congressmen and to efforts undertaken to have an international commission appointed as "high treason"?

Did the Prime Minister know?

After nearly two years of investigation, I encountered numerous harrowing moments, when I've had the feeling of physically touching evil, cowardice, treason. I shall never forget the speech delivered by Prime Minister Tusk, who threatened Polish citizens with war against Russia if they continue to seek the truth, or the touching declarations made by Minister Kopacz⁴ on sifting the soil one metre deep across the entire crash site, or on the cooperation between Polish and Russian forensic experts during the post-mortems of victims. The problem is that none of the above was true, that nearly all of the thousands of words spoken on this subject by Donald Tusk, Bronisław Komorowski and other representatives of PO have been false.

Today, however, we are facing a new situation. We are not asking any more what has happened and we are not focusing any more on challenging the reports by Ms. Anodina or Mr. Jerzy Miller. We know these reports are false and that Miller's experts have written their report without even examining the wing or the birch tree that were supposed to have caused the crash. Their findings have been discredited by their negligence of science, law and of their own responsibilities.

Today, we focus on the analysis of the hypothesis, according to which the crash was caused by explosions, as the only hypothesis that fully explains what happened; and so far, nobody came up with a credible alternative solution. And the time has come to ask who will take the blame? What did Donald Tusk know and what did he intend to do, when he separated the visits, when he handed-over the task of explaining the tragedy to Putin, when he refused to allow the US experts to investigate the crash and participate in the post-mortems of crash victims? And, finally, we shall quote here the question asked by Jarosław Kaczyński: how did Radosław Sikorski know as early as two minutes after the crash that there are no survivors, and the crash was caused by pilot error? Because if Lech Kaczyński and members of Poland's elite were assassinated, Minister Sikorski's shocking knowledge would have been a gruesome confirmation of the co-responsibility of the Government of Donald Tusk for this tragedy.

1) ABW (Agencja Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego) – Internal Security Agency, a Government institution responsible for safeguarding the internal security of the Republic of Poland and its citizens, with the primary objective to seek and effectively neutralise any threats to the internal security of the State.

2) Asia, diminutive in Polish of the name „Joanna”

3) Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland since 2007, currently in his second term in office after his party, Platforma Obywatelska PO (Civic Platform) won Parliamentary elections in 2011.

4) Ewa Kopacz, Minister of Health in the first Government of Donald Tusk, now the Speaker of the Polish Parliament, the Sejm.. She travelled to Moscow immediately after the crash to oversee the identification of and post-mortems of victims. Later Ms. Kopacz declared on the Polish TV that Polish forensic experts participated in the post-mortems and that the soil on the crash site was sifted one meter deep to recover all human remains and debris from the aircraft; both declarations proved untrue.

5) Radosław Sikorski, Minister of Foreign Affairs in both consecutive governments of Donald Tusk.

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Translation by Iranda, no copyright infringement intended.