Polish authorities say body parts of other people killed alongside Lech Kaczyński in 2010 ended up in his casket

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Polish authorities have found the remains of two other people in the coffin of former president Lech Kaczyński while investigating the plane crash in Russia that killed him and 95 others in2010.



The caskets of 11 further victims also contained body parts of others, prosecutors said after examining 24 coffins from the crash.

Some officials of the ruling rightwing party have blamed an explosion aboard for crash, but not provided evidence. The crash, in April 2010, happened near the western Russian city of Smolensk and was the worst such disaster for Poland since the second world war. It left Polish society deeply divided over the cause despite the previous, centrist, government’s conclusion from its own investigation that a pilot error was to blame.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Kaczyński brothers Lech, left, and Jarosław during a parliamentary session in Warsaw in 2005. Photograph: Jacek Turczyk/EPA

Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, led by Kaczyński’s twin brother, Jarosław, took direct control of the prosecutor’s office and moved to re-examine the crash after coming to power in late 2015, saying the previous investigation had not been conducted properly.

On Thursday, the deputy prosecutor general, Marek Pasionek, told reporters that in 12 of 24 coffins reopened since last year, bodies had been swapped twice; one coffin contained half the body of another person while nine other caskets held scattered remains of other victims.

He said the coffin of the archbishop Miron Chodakowski contained only the upper half of his body while a lower half was that of the general and military bishop Tadeusz Płoski.

In the coffin of General Bronisław Kwiatkowski there were 14 body parts belonging to seven other people, Pasionek said, adding that postmortem examinations would be finished by next April.

In Moscow, the Kremlin and Russia’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to calls and emails asking for comment.

Magdalena Merta, the widow of Tomasz Merta, a senior culture ministry official who died in the crash, accused Russia of “displaying a filthy attitude towards our dead”. She told the Polish state agency PAP: “Today we know that there was no diligence in [the postmortems conducted in Russia]. There was nonchalance in the best case, and ill-will in the worst case.”

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The government’s move to reopen the coffins had split families of victims between those who mistrusted the post-crash procedures conducted in Russia and those who wanted their loved ones to be left to rest in peace.

While some high-ranking PiS officials repeatedly suggested that a bomb onboard brought down the plane, the PiS-led investigation has not produced supporting evidence but has turned up the apparent failure of postmortems conducted in Russia to correctly identify the victims.

The plane crash occurred as pilots tried to land the Polish delegation in a Soviet-made TU-154 plane near Smolensk to take part in commemorations for thousands of Polish officers executed there by Soviet secret police in 1940.

The victims’ coffins were sealed in Russia and returned to Poland within two weeks of the plane crash. Last year, Polish prosecutors ordered the coffins to be reopened.

The findings could worsen relations with Moscow – already strained over the conflict in Ukraine – but could also ease divisions in Polish society.

Radosław Sikorski, a foreign minister under the previous government, told TVN24 on Monday, when some of the findings were leaked: “It seems that these postmortems have been conducted diligently and they finally seem to have convinced some of our compatriots that there was no assassination.”

Russia has so far refused to return the wreckage of the jet to Poland, a member of the EU and Nato, citing its own continuing investigation.