June 18, 2013

Poland: No explosives found on Polish plane wreck

BY: AP Staff Writer OCTOBER 30, 2012 | MODIFIED: OCTOBER 30, 2012 AT 1:17 PM
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WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish military prosecutors on Tuesday denied a newspaper report that said investigators had found traces of explosives in the 2010 plane crash in Russia which killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others.

Ireneusz Szelag, a spokesman for military prosecutors, said experts who examined the wreckage in recent weeks in Russia detected no explosives on plane parts or at the site of the crash. He said, however, that some chemical substances were found on parts of the wreckage that will be submitted for laboratory tests. It will take months to name those substances, he said.

"It isn't true that tests have revealed traces of trotyl and nitroglycerin on and inside the wreckage," Szelag told reporters.

The Rzeczpospolita daily later said on its website that it "made a mistake" writing about those two chemicals.

Its story reignited accusations from the opposition and some victims' families that the crash in heavy fog on approach to the rudimentary military airport in Smolensk was an assassination. The crash was Poland's worst tragedy since World War II and it has deeply divided Poles on what could be its cause.

A government report in 2011 blamed the crash on human error coupled with bad weather and airport conditions, but excluded any explosion as causing it.

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