A special sitting of the Foreign Affairs Committee is due to take place today, after a diplomatic row between Poland and Russia over the plaque unveiled in Smolensk last weekend to commemorate last April's crash victims.

There was outcry in Poland when it was discovered that on the eve of the anniversary, 10 April, Russian authorities had altered the wording on the memorial tablet.

Politicians from the left wing SLD made an appeal for clarity on Tuesday, but the sitting of the committee is also sought by opposition Law and Justice MPs, led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, twin brother of President Lech Kaczynski who died in the air crash.

Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski is abroad at an EU meeting, but his second in command, Henryk Litwin, will field questions for him from MPs.

Asked by journalists what he will say to MPs about the wording of the plaque, the vice minister said he “must first ask what the Ministry is being accused for.”

The public backlash stems from the fact that a reference to the 1940 Katyn massacre – the anniversary of which inspired President Kaczynski’s flight to Smolensk last year – was removed by the Russians, and a new plaque hastily installed.

Nevertheless, the Russian Foreign Office holds that it informed Poland in advance that the plaque was going to be altered.

The original plaque was only in Polish, and Russian authorities insisted that as a matter of course, it should be bilingual.

However, the main bone of contention is a reference to the word “genocide.”

The original inscription noted that President Kaczynski's delegation was “on the way to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Soviet crime of genocide in the Katyn Forest, carried out on prisoners of war, officers of the Polish army, in 1940.”

In March 2005, following Moscow's long-running investigation, Russia's Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov declared that the crime could not be classified as genocide.

Meanwhile, the Polish Foreign Office insists that it opposed the proposals suggested by the Russians, saying that Warsaw was not given final confirmation that the wording would be changed on Friday night.

Around 22,500 Poles were executed in the Katyn crime, at various killing fields. The victims were largely reserve officers, thus a portion of Poland's intelligentsia was eliminated. Poles see the crime as a symbol of combined repressions and liquidations carried out by the Soviets during and after the war. (nh/pg)