President Kaczynski’s body arrives in grief-stricken Warsaw

By

WARSAW, Poland – Tens of thousands of Poles sang the national anthem and tossed flowers at the hearse carrying the body of President Lech Kaczynski to the presidential palace  Sunday after it was returned from Russia, where he and dozens of political, military and religious leaders were killed in a plane crash.

The plane carrying Kaczynski’s body arrived from the Smolensk airport, where he and 95 others had been heading Saturday to honour 22,000 Polish officers slain by the Soviet secret police in 1940.

The coffin bearing Kaczynski’s remains were met first by his daughter Marta, whose mother Maria also perished in the crash. She knelt before it, her forehead resting on the coffin.

She was followed by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the former prime minister, and the president’s twin brother. He, too, knelt and pressed his head against the flag-draped coffin before rising slowly and crossing himself.

Standing sentinel were four Polish troopers bearing sabres.

There was no sign of the twins’ ailing mother Jadwiga, who has been hospitalized. The president had cancelled several foreign trips lately to be by her side.

The coffin was placed aboard a Mercedes-Benz hearse and slowly travelled several kilometres to the palace, watched by thousands of weeping Poles.

Earlier, the country held two minutes of silence in memorial for those killed in the crash.

Church bells pealed at noon and emergency sirens shrieked for nearly a minute before fading. Hundreds bowed their heads, eyes closed, in front of the presidential palace. Buses and trams halted in the streets.

No date for a funeral has been set and the presidential palace has not yet said if Kaczynski will lie in state.

The death of the president and much of the state and defence establishment in Russia, en route to commemorating one of the saddest events in the neighbouring countries’ long, complicated history, was laden with tragic irony.

“He taught Poles how to respect our traditions, how to fight for our dignity, and he made he made his sacrifice there at that tragic place,” said mourner Boguslaw Staron, 70.

Among the dead were the national bank president, the army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces. At the Field Cathedral of the Polish army in Warsaw, hundreds gathered for a morning mass and left flowers and written condolences. Government spokesman Pawel Gras said the country’s armed forces and state offices were operating normally despite the devastating losses.

Michal Boni, an official in the prime minister’s office, said they remained in constant contact with the deputy head of the National Bank of Poland, Piotr Wiesiolek.

He said the bank’s Monetary Policy Council will hold a meeting Monday, as previously planned.

“We are prepared to take various decisions, but we do not see that anything dangerous could happen in the economy,” Boni said. The economy has so far managed to avoid recession.

The acting president, Parliament Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, said he would call for early elections within 14 days, in line with the constitution. The vote must be held within another 60 days.

Kaczynski had indicated he would seek a second term in presidential elections this fall but was expected to face an uphill struggle against Komorowski and his governing party, the moderate, pro-business Civic Platform. Kaczynski’s nationalist conservative Law and Justice Party could benefit, however, from the support of a country mourning the loss of their president, particularly with elections now set to take place by late June.

In Moscow, Russia’s Transport Ministry said that Russian and Polish investigators had begun to decipher flight data recorders of the aging Soviet-built Tu-154 airliner that crashed while trying to land in deep fog in Smolensk.

Russian officials had said 97 people were killed but revised the figure to 96. Poland’s Foreign Ministry also confirmed the figure.

The Smolensk regional government said Russian dispatchers had asked the Polish crew to divert from the military airport there because of the fog and land instead in Moscow or Minsk, the capital of neighbouring Belarus.

Former president, Solidarity founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa, said it was too soon to cast blame.

“Someone must have been taking decisions on that plane. I don’t believe that the pilot took decisions single-handedly,” he told reporters. “That’s not possible. I have flown a lot and whenever there were doubts, they always came to the leaders and asked for a decision, and based on that, pilots took decisions. Sometimes the decision was against the leader’s instructions”.

“Kaczynski, 60, was the first serving Polish leader to die since exiled Second World War-era leader general Wladyslaw Sikorski was killed in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943”.

Kaczynski’s twin brother flew to Smolensk on Saturday evening and identified the body of his brother and sister-in-law.

In Warsaw’s historic centre, large sections of the street were blocked to traffic to allow the flow of people expressing their grief. Mourners carried candles and roses and joined a long line to sign a book of condolences in the palace.

Top Stories

Top Stories

Most Watched Today