WARSAW, May 23 (RAPSI, Leonid Sviridov) – Poland’s Main Military Prosecutor’s Office has received new copies of recordings from the pilots’ cabin of the presidential plane that crashed outside Smolensk, Russia on April 10, 2010, the spokesman of the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office, Captain Marcin Maksjan, said on Thursday.

He said that a Polish prosecutor and three Polish experts had made new copies of the recordings from the plane’s black boxes. Experts hope to obtain more information from the new copies, which were made using new methods and cutting-edge technology.

The defendants in the case are two officers from the disbanded 36th Special Aviation Regiment, which carried government officials. They have been charged with neglecting their duty when preparing the fights to Russia of Prime Minister Donald Tusk on April 7 and President Lech Kaczynski on April 10, 2010.

Their case was transferred to the District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw in 2011. Prosecutors believed that the defendants were guilty, yet their case was dismissed in July 2012 for the lack of basic evidence of a crime. In 2013, the investigation was reopened by a court decision.

The Russian-made Tu-154 jet, carrying President Kaczynski, his wife and a host of top officials, crashed in heavy fog as it attempted to land at an airfield near Smolensk on April 10, 2010. The delegation was flying to Smolensk to mark the 70th anniversary of the 1940 Katyn massacre of thousands of Polish officers. All 96 people aboard the plane died.

The Interstate Aviation Committee (IAC) published the final conclusions of the technical investigation in 2011. According to the report, the direct cause of the disaster was the pilots’ refusal to fly to a reserve airfield, coupled with inadequate training of the crew and flight preparations.