Non-Crew in Cockpit in Polish President's Plane Crash

Non-crew members were present in the cockpit of a plane that crashed killing the Polish president and more than 90 others, an investigation has found. One of the non-crew members has been identified, though he or she was not named by officials, reports BBC News.

The plane crashed as it tried to land in western Russia on 10 April, killing President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of senior Poles.

The investigation confirmed crew were repeatedly warned about poor weather. An air traffic control official "warned twice that visibility was 400m (1,312ft) and that there were no conditions for landing", said Alexei Morozov, head of the technical commission examining the crash, releasing the preliminary findings of the investigation.

The Tupolev-154 presidential plane was in full working order when it crashed, Morozov said, according to a report by Itar-Tass. He said systems at the Smolensk airport where the plane was trying to land were also operating normally.

The investigation, which was carried out by the inter-state air committee for the former Soviet Union, ruled out any terrorist attack, explosion, or fire on board the aircraft. The plane was flying Kaczynski and the other passengers to an event commemorating the 1940 Katyn massacre of more than 20,000 Poles by Soviet forces.

Shortly after the crash, there was speculation that passengers may have put pressure on the crew to land in Smolensk, though Polish officials said at the time that there was no evidence to substantiate such claims.

On Wednesday, the head of the inter-state air committee, Tatyana Anodina, said the investigation had established "in the cockpit there were individuals who were not members of the crew.""The voice of one of them has been identified exactly, the voice of the other, or the others, will require additional information from the Polish side," she said.

The investigation found that the pilot's cabin door was open as the plane tried to land and the voices of the crew were hard to identify, Itar-Tass reported.

Anodina stressed that the crew had received "timely information about weather conditions and alternate airfields", and that there had been no equipment failure.

"The engines were working up till the moment the plane collided with the ground," she said, adding that she was confident that investigators would establish the causes of the crash as quickly as possible.

Results would be made available to authorities in Russia and Poland, and to the public, she said.