After the exhumation of Smolensk victim Anna Walentynowicz on Monday, relatives have confirmed in a released public statement that the body is not that of the legendary Solidarity activist. Her son, Janusz said that the remains are "not the body of my mother".

 

"The person I saw today on the autopsy table was certainly not the person I recognised in Moscow."

 

Piotr Walentynowicz, Anna's grandson, also said:

"I do not recognise that body as my grandmother's body," he said.

 

The Military Prosecutor's Office hasn’t allowed world-famous pathologist Michael Baden to take part in the exhumation and autopsy of Anna Walentynowicz’s alleged remains, just as it did in regards to previous exhumations of victims of the Smolensk plane crash, at the request of families.

 

This week's exhumation brings the total to five, and the military prosecutor's office has not ruled out the possibility of further exhumations in the near future. So far, the exhumations have been undertaken under the prosecutions own initiative and judgment, systematically refusing such requests to relatives.

 

28 months after the crash relatives of the Smolensk victims face the dreadful possibility of further exhumations due to numerous breaches and failure to ensure that recognised international standards were adopted during the identification and burial procedures. Concerns have also been raised about the exhumation procedure itself.

 

Families of victims, since autopsy files have been made available to them, have questioned the accuracy of the autopsy files, due to overwhelming amount of inconsistencies suggesting falsification or pure fabrication. Many relatives of the Smolensk victims have openly accused the autopsy files to have been falsified.

 

A fact to remember and keep in mind is that the coffins of the victims have been sealed in Russia and never allowed to be opened, once in Poland.

 

---

 

Anna Walentynowicz: Legendary co-founder of the Solidarity Trade Union, The Mother of Solidarity, Dame of the Order of the White Eagle, influential critic of the Round Table negotiations and of the post-communist nomenclature. Her firing in August 1980 was the event that ignited the strike at the Shipyard in Gdansk that quickly paralysed the Baltic coast and triggered a giant wave of strikes in Poland.

 

 

fot. Wojciech Barczyński