Smolensk disaster - 'I was told President Kaczynski may have survived'

Jaroslaw Kaczynski at a press conferenvce in rybnik, southern Poland, Monday: photo PAP/Andrzej Grygiel

"I was told in the morning of April 10, 2010, when I was in hospital visiting my mother, that my brother may have survived,” Kaczynski, leader of the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party told reporters on Monday.

Kaczynski was speaking in the wake of claims last week by another Law and Justice MP, Antoni Macierewicz that three people had secretly survived the air disaster, while official Polish and Russian investigations confirmed that all 96 died on board the TU-154 that was taking President Lech Kaczynski to a WW II Katyn massacre memorial ceremony in western Russia.

“The information [that President Kaczynski may have survived] was, apparently, from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” Jaroslaw Kaczynski added today.

Quizzed by reporters on the claim by MP Macierewicz – who leads an opposition parliamentary investigation into the causes of the disaster - that he had evidence from eye witnesses that three people, “who were taken away in an ambulance” had survived the disaster, Kaczynski said that “after nearly three years of research, I can say with great certainty that the claims that three people probably survived the [disaster] are reliable”.

Law and Justice has yet to produce evidence from “three independent sources” who, they allege, saw three people being taken away from the crash site, however.

The latest claim from the conservative opposition party is meant to support Kaczynski's assertion that his brother did not die in a plane accident caused by human error, as the two official reports found.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski said on Monday that the “only theory that explains everything is that it was an assassination”. (pg)

Source: PAP