WARSAW, May 25 (Reuters) - Poland's air force chief was in the cockpit of a plane carrying President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others when it crashed in Russia but there was no sign of direct pressure on pilots to land, the main Polish investigator said.
Still, the disclosure may reinforce speculation that the pilots decided to land their Tu-154 military plane at Smolensk airport against the advice of air traffic controllers because of pressure from Kaczynski or members of his entourage.
Kaczynski was running late for a planned April 10 ceremony in nearby Katyn forest marking the 70th anniversary of the murder of some 22,000 Polish army officers and intellectuals there by the Soviet NKVD secret police.
Russian aviation officials investigating the cause of the crash confirmed last week that two non-crew members were in the cockpit just before the crash. But investigator Edmund Klich was the first official publicly to identify one of them.
Asked in an interview on Poland’s TVN channel late on Monday who was in the cockpit with crew at the time of the crash, Klich said: "It was General (Andrzej) Blasik… He may have wanted to get a sense of the situation.
"There is no sentence (in the black box recordings) indicating direct pressure on the crew to land such as, ‘We really need to land’. Of course, you can also mount pressure by the sole fact of being there," the investigator said.
Psychologists are studying the recordings, he added.
Kaczynski, a combative nationalist who was very keen to attend the Katyn commemoration, is known to have tried in vain to persuade his pilot in 2008 to ignore nearby gunfire and land in Georgia during that country’s brief war with Russia.
MATERIALS TO BE PUBLISHED
Klich, the head of a Polish committee that analyses airplane crashes, who is taking part in the official Russian inquiry, said the crew would have been aware just a few seconds before the crash on April 10 that they were doomed.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Tuesday the country’s interior minister would visit Moscow in the coming days to discuss the progress of the investigation and bring back "all relevant materials" to Warsaw.
"I think the materials will be made public, probably as a written version of everything that was deciphered from the black box recordings," Tusk told a news conference.
Among those who died with Kaczynski and Blasik were the heads of Poland’s army and navy, its central bank governor, lawmakers and members of the presidential administration. Poles will elect a new president on June 20. Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw is running for the post but is expected to take second place behind Bronislaw Komorowski, the candidate of Tusk’s centrist ruling Civic Platform.
