WARSAW — Polish experts have retrieved bones, probably human, from the site of an air crash near Smolensk where Poland's president and dozens of other dignitaries perished in April, prosecutors said Tuesday.
The find could fuel concerns among families of the victims that they may not have been given the correct remains of their loved ones for burial by Russian authorities following the disaster at the Smolensk airport, in which 96 people died.
Some victims' families are considering exhumation, saying they are not sure the coffins they received really contained the bodies of their relatives, and a group of archeologists has been examining the site recently for human remains.
"The archeologists have found elements of bones on the crash site, which are most probably human bones," said Zbigniew Rzepa, spokesman for the Polish military prosecutor's office.
"The elements will be now analyzed and, if it is confirmed that they are human bones, they will be moved to a laboratory in Moscow to identify them precisely," he said.
Rafal Rogalski, a representative of several of the families, said the widow of Przemyslaw Gosiewski, a conservative lawmaker of the main opposition Law and Justice party, would file a motion with the military prosecutor's office this week to exhume her husband's body.
Other families, mostly of non-Law and Justice crash victims, have appealed not to politicize the tragedy.
Analysts do not expect crash-related problems to derail a rapprochement between Russia and Poland, with President Dmitry Medvedev scheduled to visit Warsaw on Dec. 6. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will also visit Warsaw and co-host a meeting of a Polish-Russian strategic cooperation committee with his Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski.
