Investigators in Poland have started exhuming the bodies of a Polish president and his wife killed in a 2010 air disaster to determine whether they died in an accident or were assassinated.

President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria were among the 96 who perished when their government aircraft crashed while coming into land at Smolensk airport in western Russia over six years ago.

The exhumations are part of a new investigation into the crash initiated by Law and Justice, Poland’s governing party.