Horror plane crash which took the life of Polish president and 18 MPs caused by fog

dailystar.co.uk:

plane crash which took the life of the Polish President, as well as 18 MPs.On April 10, 2010, a Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft operating Polish Air Force Flight 101 carrying Polish president Lech Kaczynski and 95 others crashed in the Smolensk military airfield in Western Russia, killing everyone on board, in what is described as Poland's worst national disaster since World War Two.

The list of victims included the country's commanders of its ground, sea, air and special forces, the head of its central bank and several other dignitaries.The officials had been on their way from Warsaw to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, in which some 22,000 Polish intellectuals and prisoners of war were murdered on Soviet orders in 1940.The pilots were attempting to land at Smolensk North Airport – a former military airbase – in thick fog, with visibility reduced to about 1,600ft (500m).The aircraft descended far below the normal approach path until its left wing hit a tree and crashed into the ground, coming to rest in a wooded area a short distance from the runway.To stay up to date with all the latest news, make sure you sign up to one of our newsletters here.Both the Polish and Russian official investigations found no technical faults with the aircraft, concluding that the crash was an accident caused by human error and thick fog over Smolensk.The Law and Justice (PiS) party however – led by the late president’s twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski – did not accept the findings and claimed the crash was a political assassination.In 2012, then-PiS spokesman Adam Hofman said: “The disaster needs to be clarified through politics, as it happened because of politics.“We say clearly: we need to win elections to explain the case.