Former president to testify in Smolensk probe

Ewa Bialik, a spokeswoman for the National Public Prosecutor's Office, said Komorowski would testify as a witness about the circumstances surrounding the plane crash.

Komorowski was a Speaker in Poland’s lower house of parliament at the time of the crash. He has previously said that he was not involved in planning former President Lech Kaczyński’s ill-fated trip to Smolensk.

According to Polish Radio’s IAR news agency, Komorowski’s testimony will refer to accusations of negligence on part of Polish officials, including military prosecutors, who allegedly were not present for the autopsies of the victims in Russia and failed to reexamine the bodies after they were transported to Poland.

In April 2016, the National Public Prosecutor's Office took over investigations into the 2010 Smolensk disaster, which killed 96 people, including Kaczyński and many top military and political figures.

The prosecution started to exhume all the bodies that were neither cremated nor previously exhumed following allegations of errors in Russian autopsy reports.

The last of the exhumations is expected in mid-May.

Earlier this week, Bialik said 77 victims’ bodies had been exhumed as part of a new investigation into the crash, revealing that two bodies had been wrongly identified and consequently buried in the wrong graves.

Tests have shown that a total of 69 parts of 26 bodies have been found in the coffins of other people, and bits of rubber gloves, strings, bottles and phials with sanitising agents were found in many of the bodies, Bialik said.

Last Tuesday marked exactly eight years since the Polish plane crashed near Smolensk, western Russia, killing all those on board.

Prosecutors probing the crash have so far heard from dozens of witnesses, including European Council President Donald Tusk, who was prime minster at the time, then-Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, and then-Health Minister Ewa Kopacz. (vb)

Source: IAR