RIDDLE OF ‘FALSE’ INDICATIONS
ARTUR STELMASIAK
It is not known why detectors in Smoleńsk discovered explosive materials, and experts in Warsaw did not – we can summarize the statement of the Main Military Prosecutors in this way
Everybody who thought that the final opinion of experts from the Central Forensic Laboratory would cut further speculations about the vestiges of trinitrotoluene on the governmental airplane Tu-154M wreckage and would be definitely finished, are not satisfied. Even if the chief of the District Military Procurators the culprit Ireneusz Szeląg was trying to convince journalists of the fact that nothing had confirmed any vestiges about the explosion of the wreckage and about casualties’ bodies, he was not able to answer questions concerning details. – How to explain the fact that in Smoleńsk high-energy particles were uncovered, including trinitrotoluene but in Warsaw they were not? What chemical compounds misled specialist detectors? – asked journalists.
Expertise without an answer
The experts from the Central Forensic Laboratory did not practically give any answers to these questions. This opinion is more doubtful that the request for clarifying this thread was sent from the Procurators to the Central Forensic Laboratory earlier. Unfortunately, the complemented expertise still refers only to samples, not to what the experts might have uncovered, while investigating the wreckage.
During a press conference the colonel Szeląg was trying to omit this issue. – The specifics of detectors is that they can give false positive indications. From our point of view it is not important what chemical substances gave a result similar to explosive materials. What is important is the fact that these were not explosive materials – said the colonel Szeląg, defending the experts.
Explanations about this matter are demanded by proxies of the families who have already submitted requests for complementing the opinion. For the matter is so important that it should be explained from the beginning to the end. Specialists who know how detectors function, say explicitly that it is impossible that they might have given a few hundred wrong indications.
- If there were not any signs of explosive materials, procurators should do everything in order to indicate the substance on the wreckage which misled these devices – says Stanisław Zagrodzki, the cousin of deceased Ewa Bąkowska who was killed in the air crash. However, it turns out that military procurators surrendered in further investigations. – They want to leave us without any answers to this question: Why were there vestiges of explosive materials in Smoleńsk, and in Warsaw they were not found? – adds Zagrodzki.
The Main Military Procurators: the airplane ‘might’ have crashed into a birch tree
Experts from the Central Forensic Laboratory consistently and explicitly excluded chemical vestiges of explosive materials on the wreckage and physical destructions which could indicate the explosion of explosive materials.
On the basis of statements of the so-called pyrotechnical opinion, the document of the investigation of the Smoleńsk birch tree appears to be more enigmatic. For it turns out that among 20 metal fragments found in the birch tree only 3 elements ‘can come from the wing of the airplane’. As it concerns other 7 elements, the experts said that ‘they cannot exclude that they come from this airplane’.
What is more, it turns out that this strong inexplicit opinion of experts refers only to 10 elements from 40 found elements. Therefore there is this question: what happened with other 30 elements? We should recall the fact that the experts from the Central Forensic Laboratory were to prepare a detailed mechano-hygroscopic opinion which would explicitly state with which element the airplane crashed into the birch tree. Whereas at present we have only 3 pieces of metal which ‘have a similar elemental composition’ to the one ‘ from which among the others wings of airplanes are made’.
The expertise whose fragments were mentioned by the colonel Szeląg, does not dispel doubts whether the airplane crashed into the birch tree, and if it did, then with which element in its construction. And it might seem that the modern science is able to adjust a piece of metal to the fragment of a broken wing. A similar analysis can be expected through samples of the tree taken from a wing and a broken birch tree.
- They did not even analyze the chemical composition of the varnish from these fragments – Zagrodzki explains. – Even if we agree with the experts from the Central Forensic Laboratory, that some metal fragments come from a wing, it is not known form which place. So, we will find out whether the wing was broken by the birch tree.
Silence before a storm
During a conference the colonel Szeląg, pressed by journalists admitted that the investigation is being carried out in a difficult situation because ‘on the one hand we are being liquidated’, and on the other hand – there appear also ‘threats of MPs’. The colonel also referred to the statement of the justice minister Marek Biernacki who decided that the investigation should be finished. In this situation – in the opinion of Szeląg – we should think again on the fact of separating the procurators from the Justice Ministry.
The colonel was complaining to journalists that the Procurators are unjustly evaluated, and are even the ‘object of insults’. There was also a policy and publicistic appeal. The procurator Szeląg drew journalists’ attention to the words of the parliamentarian Antoni Macierewicz, who has recently expressed a respectful opinion about dr. Antoni Milkiewicz, the chief of the team of experts investigating the catastrophe. – Please, remember these words of the parliamentarian Macierewicz – noted the procurator. This alleged exchange of praises can prove only one thing – that the colonel Szeląg expects a serious storm.
(AA)
"Niedziela" 16/2014