Protests as Poles mark air crash anniversary Rival ceremonies were held in Poland on Tuesday to mark the second anniversary of the 2010 air disaster that killed the country's president. The crash, which killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, including many top officials, continues to divide the country and has become a touchstone for the political right, which believes it was not an accident but murder. As Jaroslaw Kaczynski, twin brother of the dead president and leader of the rightwing opposition Law and Justice party, laid a memorial wreath on Tuesday, demonstrators thronged the streets of the capital denouncing the crash as an assassination. The day's events were carefully timed so that Donald Tusk, the prime minister, and President Bronislaw Komorowski did not cross paths with Mr Kaczynski, who refused to join the official observances. The crash took place early on the morning of April 10 2010, when a Polish government Tu-154 airliner approached a badly maintained airfield near the Russian city of Smolensk in dense fog and smashed into the ground, killing all 96 people aboard. The Polish delegation was travelling to the nearby Katyn forest, scene of a massacre of Polish prisoners of war by the Soviets in 1940. Subsequent Russian and Polish investigations put the bulk of the blame on the pilots, who were badly trained, violated regulations about landing in low visibility, misread their instruments and had problems in understanding Russian. Polish investigators also found that the Russian air control was chaotic and the airport did not meet international standards. However, for supporters of the Kaczynski twins, the disaster is seen as part of a long history of Poland's suffering at the hands of its more powerful neighbours . Those views were on full display outside the Russian embassy on Monday night, when several hundred protesters waved signs denouncing Mr Tusk, accusing him of being in cahoots with Vladimir Putin, Russia's president elect, in the killing of Mr Kaczynski. Effigies of the two were then burned. Jaroslaw Kaczynski was initially unwilling to fully back the conspiracy theorists. But in a recent interview with the onet internet portal he said: "Everything indicates that it ended with a coup. I have a feeling that President Lech Kaczynski was murdered. A parliamentary committee dominated by Mr Kaczynski's party has come to the conclusion that the airliner was brought down by two explosions that tore it apart just above the ground - something that no official investigation has confirmed. Earlier conspiracy theories posited that the airliner had crash landed and that Russian secret police then assassinated the survivors, that the Russians artificially generated the fog that led to the crash, that they scrambled the airliner's cockpit instruments, or that mysterious equipment changed the composition of the air over the runway by generating helium. The belief that the crash was a planned attack has become the main unifier of Poland's political right - much more so than views on taxation, the European Union or social policy. But it has made Mr Kaczynski's party unacceptable to a majority of Poles, keeping it confined to its core support of about a quarter of the electorate. A survey conducted by the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper found that 18 per cent of those surveyed believe the crash was an assassination, and that a majority of Mr Kaczynski's supporters view the crash as a more important event in Polish history than the end of communism in 1989 or Poland's 2004 entry into the EU.