In a new development in the investigation into the Smolensk air disaster, it has been revealed that the black box recorder on the doomed TU-154 recorded five voices in the cockpit minutes before it crashed.
The fifth voice did not belong to any of the four members of the crew who were in the cockpit: the pilot, the second pilot, the navigator and the engineer. It might have belonged to a stewardess or a passenger but the Prosecutor’s Office does not want to reveal whose voice it was.
The revelation will add to those who allege that the pilot was put under undue pressure to land in Smolensk and not in Moscow or Minsk as was suggested by air traffic control.
Russian investigators are still examining two black boxes which contain voice recordings and flight parameters. One of the boxes recorded an alarm in the cockpit, pilots’ dramatic speech and horrific screams on the flight deck moments before the Tupolev-154 hit the ground. Meanwhile, the Military Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw is examining the third box, trying to establish whether the plane was faulty, how the flying crew behaved, whether a terrorist attack was possible and whether passengers tried to influence the pilots’ decisions.
One of the crash hypotheses assumes that the President Lech Kaczynski might have put pressure on pilots, forcing them to land in spite of bad weather conditions at the military airport near Smolensk. A similar situation occurred when Kaczynski flew to a war-stricken Georgia and insisted on landing in Tbilisi. Such course of events has not been confirmed yet for the Smolensk catastrophe.
But a spokesman from the Attorney-General warns against speculative reports which have been inundating media since the crash.
“Poles should not speculate about the black box recordings until they actually receive them,” Mateusz Martyniuk from the Prosecutor’s Office told Polish Radio.
Attorney General Andrzej Seremet and Interior Minister Jerzy Miller are meeting Russian investigators in Moscow to discuss the transfer of evidence, including black boxes, back to Poland. “We hope to receive the evidence gathered by Russian investigators as soon as possible,” said Martyniuk. (mg/pg)
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Polish investigators want black boxes back from Russia, thenews.pl, May 5