“I can only say that absolutely everyone received what they identified,” Dr Viktor Kolkutin told the Polish edition of Newsweek.
“What happened after the coffins departed from Moscow to Poland we do not know,” he said.
“We did not lead the coffins to the graves where they were laid to rest,” he said.
Dr Kolkutin's remarks come after exhumations and second autopsies proved last month that the late Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz was buried in the wrong grave (unofficially it has been confirmed that the coffin was confused with that of another victim, Teresa Walewska-Przyjalkowska.)
Dr Kolkutin stressed that the families of the victims were in “shock”, and implied that the Russian medics were not expecting relatives to linger long in the identification process.
“If we are talking about the identification process itself, no one expected heroic acts from the Poles,” he underlined.
However, Kolkutin said that relatives were accompanied by psychologists who made sure that documents were only signed when “they were completely sure that they had identified their loved ones.”
Following a second autopsy last month, Janusz Walentynowicz, son of Anna Walentynowicz, said that “the person on whom the autopsy was conducted today (19 September) is not the person I recognised in Moscow as my mother, it was someone completely different.”
Some 96 people died in the crash near Smolensk, taking in the entire delegation of President Lech Kaczynski.
Dr Kolkutin said that “over two thirds” of the victims were recognisable without great difficulty. In some instances, attempts were made to reconstruct faces, so as the “lessen the shock” felt by relatives.
The Military Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw has already confirmed that four other exhumations are due to take place, owing to possible mistakes, but that the names will remain confidential, owing to requests for privacy from the families concerned.
Anna Walentynowicz was one of the iconic figures of the Solidarity Movement. It was her firing from the former Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk – on account of her participation in an illegal trade union – that prompted the now legendary strike led by Lech Walesa in August 1980. (nh)