His wife claimed that he called her shortly after the crash, but changed her testimony after meeting with the ABW (Pol. abbr. Internal Security Agency).
Joanna Krasowska-Deptuła, the widow of MP Leszek Deptuła of PSL who died in the Smolensk disaster on April 10, 2010, testified that her husband called her at the time of the crash. The woman did not answer the phone, and a message was left on her voice mail. This information was provided several hours after the Smolensk crash by the weekly "Wprost."
“Between 9 am and 9.30 am, a voice mail came on my phone, which registered the voice recording of my husband, who shouted: "Asia, Asia!" In the background, you could hear crackling, and actually the voice of my husband was in the background. We could hear the voices of people too, like the voices of the crowd. I did not recognize the words, it was the cry of the people. The recording lasted 2-3 seconds. The cracklings were short, sharp sounds. As if breaking the waffle or plastic, plus a sound like wind noise in the telephone handset,” testified Krasowska-Deptuła. She listened to this message only after she heard about the crash on television.
Then the recording was erased. A day later, the woman informed the Internal Security Agency about all of it and asked them to find the recording and examine it. Shortly thereafter, Andrew Rzepa, a spokesman of the Chief Military Prosecutors' Office, said that the recording came from the Polish territory. Subsequently the woman changed her testimony.
The problem is that the families of the victims have not been given any proper evidence from the autopsy and medical reports as to the cause of death of their loved ones. They neither know the precise time when their loved ones were killed, nor the reasons, or causes of their death, even though six years have passed from this tragedy.
The issues related to mobile phones was first raised by the parliamentary committee chaired by Antoni Macierewicz. [Read more here] Thus far, no answers have been provided beyond the information that at least 19 cell phones were active at the time of the crash, as disclosed by the Military Prosecutors’ Office.
From the Editor's Desk: A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin’s corruption.
In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder’s offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund’s companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder’s attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear.
From the Editor's Desk: A chilling and unflinching portrait of one of the most fearsome figures in world politics.
In 1999, the “Family” surrounding Boris Yeltsin went looking for a successor to the ailing and increasingly unpopular president. Vladimir Putin, with very little governmental or administrative experience - he’d been deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, and briefly, director of the secret police - nevertheless seemed the perfect choice: a “faceless” creature whom Yeltsin and his cronies could mold in their own image. Russia and an infatuated West were determined to see in him the progressive leader of their dreams - even as Putin, with ruthless efficiency, dismantled the country’s media, wrested control and wealth from the business class, and destroyed the fragile mechanisms of democracy.
From the Editor's Desk: "Blowing Up Russia" contains the allegations of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko against his former spymasters in Moscow which led to his being murdered in London in November 2006. In the book he and historian Yuri Felshtinsky detail how since 1999 the Russian secret service has been hatching a plot to return to the terror that was the hallmark of the KGB.
Vividly written and based on Litvinenko's 20 years of insider knowledge of Russian spy campaigns, Blowing Up Russia describes how the successor of the KGB fabricated terrorist attacks and launched a war. Writing about Litvinenko, the surviving co-author recounts how the banning of the book in Russia led to three earlier deaths.
Already during the first night of the crash, the Russians were removing the most important pieces of evidence from the crash site, that is, the remains of the Polish President’s Tupolev, TU-154M. Parts of the aircraft were transported away without any prior planning, and some of them were purposefully destroyed. Read more here
"Russian Image Management"
The trip to Smolensk was expected to highlight Russia finally admitting culpability in the massacre, after long having blamed it on the Germans, an atrocity they had tried to conceal for over 70 years.
As for the reception committee, it had different ideas. Putin wasn’t looking forward to such an occasion. Into this poisonous reception brew was President Kaczynski’s well-known public criticism of Moscow and Putin, a habit that has ended the lives of others within Russia – and abroad. A few discouraging Russian requirements – that Kaczynski could not attend in any official capacity – did not halt the Poles. Kaczynski would go anyway on non-official, “personal” business. To Russians, such a distinction would be meaningless, not lessening the possible international excoriation of such an event. A problem ripe for a modern, Russian solution: a tragic, ‘natural’ accident.
World-renowned forensic pathologist goes on the record: "I have been doing autopsies for 50 years, and I've investigated more than fifteen, twenty airplane crashes […] I've been in countries all over the world where families think that the government is hiding something. Whether it is Zimbabwe or Israel, or Philippines, the government may not like an outside person checking to make sure they got it right. [But,] they never interfered with that. The family, the next of kin, always has the right to do what the wishes of the family are. In the 21st century, the body of the dead person no longer belongs to the state. It belongs to the family. So, it is unusual - something that I have never experienced before - where the government [of Poland] has not permitted the famil[ies]" to conduct independent forensic examinations of their loved ones' remains [...] I've never heard of a body coming back to a country and the family being unable to open up a casket. I've never heard of the family not being able to get an autopsy… Read more here
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