Antoni Macierewicz should be deprived of his parliamentary immunity and answer to the court for cases that concern his activities as head of the Smolensk Subcommittee," said Cezary Tomczyk, Deputy Head of the MON. According to him, many irregularities occurred in the work of the subcommittee. The parliament will decide this afternoon on the destiny of the PiS MP's immunity.
– A group of people led by Antoni Macerewicz sought not to show the fact about the crash of the presidential plane close Smolensk April 10, 2010, but to hide it – said Cezary Tomczyk, Deputy Minister of Defence during a press conference at the Defence Ministry in Warsaw. The deputy chief of the MON added that in an absolute, cynical and unscrupulous way, an aviation disaster was utilized to prosecute a policy based on a national tragedy. The conference afraid Macerewicz's activities as the head of the subcommittee to re-examine the plane accident Tu-154 (the alleged Smolensk Subcommittee) and related irregularities.
Irregularities in the subcommittee
On Tuesday morning, during the secret part of the session, the Sejm dealt with the prosecution's request to give consent to the waiver of immunity to Antoni Macierewicz, MP of Law and Justice. The D.A. wants to charge him with making public classified information as the head of the alleged Smolensk subcommittee. The parliamentary Rules Committee yesterday advocated the waiver of immunity. The vote is scheduled for this afternoon.
"I call on all Members to vote in favour of Antoni Macierewicz being deprived of parliamentary immunity, in my opinion he should answer to the court for all matters concerning his activities," said Tomczyk. According to the study of the peculiar MON squad who examined the activities of the Smolensk Subcommittee, there are papers which do not leave any uncertainty that there has been irregularities in the activities of the subcommittee Macerewicz.
– Classified materials, including secret and top secret, were kept on an open server, which could be utilized by all MON employees, and erstwhile an appropriate IT strategy was created to safe specified materials, Macerewicz never even logged in to it," Tomczyk said.
Furthermore, as the deputy chief of the MON said, a copy of the Military Counterintelligence Service's operational materials was made at the request of Macerewicz. – Documents, which should not be available to outsiders, were copied on average photocopiers in the corridor – said Tomczyk and stressed that it is inactive unclear what happened to these copies. “In 2016 and 2018, the head of the SKW asked Macierewicz to return classified and top secret documents, and to this day, to my knowledge, these papers were not found,” said the Deputy Minister.
The deputy chief of the MON besides calculated that evidence was lost during the work of the subcommittee, including fragments of the aircraft sent for investigation to the U.S. NIAR company, expert agreements were concluded with people without competence, and access to information about the work of the subcommittee, including those classified, had citizens of another states.
In addition, as Tomczyk said, the members of the committee were falsifying and altering their content
If they didn't fit their thesis. As an example, the Deputy Minister provided NIAR's expertise, which stated that Tu-154 had crashed by hitting the ground, and Macierewicz then stated that according to NIAR's findings the device had broken down over the ground.
The Deputy Minister of Defence besides recalled that the full cost of operating the Smolensk Subcommittee amounted to PLN 81.5 million, of which PLN 47 million is the cost of destroying the Tupolev survey, PLN 34.5 million is the amount spent on the operation of the Subcommittee, additionally, after the publication of the report, another PLN 4.8 million was spent. In turn about PLN 1 million was spent on the protection of Macerewicz.
– The case is serious and developmental, it is only the tip of the iceberg of cases for which Antoni Macierewicz is liable – Tomczyk concluded.
Prosecution charges
The MON Subcommittee on the re-examination of the plane accident Tu-154 under Smolensk on 10 April 2010 (the alleged Smolensk Subcommittee) was established in 2016 by the head of MON Antoni Macierewicz, who headed it 2 years later. In April 2022, Macerewicz presented a study on the work of the subcommittee which questioned the findings of the State Air Accident Investigation Commission under Jerzy Miller. Her experts stated that the disaster was caused by errors of pilots and air controllers, among others. However, according to the members of the Subcommittee of Macerewicz, the Tu-154 disaster caused an explosion. In the left wing and detonation in the centreline of the presidential aircraft.
After the current government took power, the Smolensk Subcommittee was dissolved by the decision of Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of MON. On 19 January 2024, a squad was set up in the MON to measure the reliability, legitimacy and cost-effectiveness of the activities undertaken by the erstwhile subcommittee.
In October 2024, the Ministry of Defence presented a study to this team. "When examining the activities of the subcommittee, I consider that its aim was to confirm 1 hypothesis about the detonation and to reject all another arguments and expertise that did not support this hypothesis. These actions were aimed solely at achieving political objectives, not at explaining the causes of the disaster," said Deputy Prime Minister Kosiniak-Kamish at the time.
The study rejects, among others, the deficiency of integrity, the presence of unqualified persons and the violation of the Act on the Protection of Classified Information. On the basis of the conclusions of the team, the management of the MON sent 41 notifications to the prosecutors about the anticipation of committing a crime in connection with the work of the Smolensk subcommittee. 24 of them afraid Macerewicz (e.g. allegations of non-compliance, actions contrary to the rules on the protection of classified information, statements of untruth in documents, deficiency of appropriate supervision, approval of 3rd parties to work in subcommittees or forgeries of documents), 10 referred to the erstwhile head of MON Mariusz Błaszczak and others to the another members of the subcommittee.
On the basis of these notifications in November 2024, a squad was established in the National Prosecutor's Office to analyse irregularities in the functioning of the subcommittee. "The analysis of the materials allowed for the adoption of a legitimate suspicion of a crime, which resulted in the initiation of 5 investigations involving a full of 21 acts on 18 November 2024", stated yesterday in Przemysław Nowak, a PK spokesman. He added that the PK investigation squad besides took over 2 investigations in this case from the Military territory Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw and presently conducts 7 investigations.
Macierewicz told journalists yesterday that all the information presently provided was lies and added that no top-secret material is published in either the study or the annexes.
