Poland mourns lost President, elite

Poland is confronting the worst political disaster in its postwar history after President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and dozens of top officials were killed when their plane crashed in thick fog in western Russia.

At least 96 people died, including eight crew members, when the President's Tupolev plane clipped trees on its approach to Smolensk airport and broke up. There were no survivors.

Russian television showed pictures of the upended wing and smouldering fuselage.

The crash wiped out almost half of Poland's leadership.

Those killed included Kaczynski, his wife Maria, the Army chief of staff, the head of the national bank, the Deputy Foreign Minister, 12 members of Parliament, Army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy Parliament Speaker, Olympic Committee head, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides, the Polish Foreign Ministry said.

Among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, whose 1980 dismissal from the Gdansk shipyards ignited the strike that led to Solidarity's creation.

Poland's Foreign Ministry said there were 89 people on the passenger list but one had not shown up for the roughly 1-hour flight.

Kaczynski had been flying to Smolensk to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, where Soviet secret police executed 15,000 Polish officers in one of the most notorious incidents of World War II.

In a tragic twist, family members of the Katyn victims were on board the President's plane.

The Tu-154 that crashed was 26 years old. It was overhauled in December in Russia, with Russian experts yesterday insisting it was airworthy and blaming pilot error and bad weather.

Russian officials said the airport, 434km west of Moscow, had been closed because of thick fog.

They advised the pilot to land instead in Moscow or Minsk. But he continued with the original flight plan - making three abortive attempts to land.

On the fourth attempt, the Russian-built airliner crashed. According to witnesses, Kaczynski's plane was 20m off the ground when it ploughed into the trees.

The Smolensk airfield is not equipped with an instrument landing system to guide planes to the ground.

Although there was no suspicion of foul play, the timing and location of the disaster - together with Kaczynski's known antipathy towards the Kremlin - are likely to fuel conspiracy theories.

"We still cannot fully understand the scope of this tragedy and what it means for us in the future. Nothing like this has ever happened in Poland," Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Piotr Paszkowski, said.

In Warsaw, Poland's Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, held an extraordinary Cabinet meeting. Looking shattered, Tusk emerged to declare national mourning.

"The contemporary world has not seen such a tragedy," he said.

Poles wept before their televisions, lowered flags to half-staff and taped black ribbons in their windows.

Thousands of people, many in tears, placed candles and flowers at the presidential palace in central Warsaw.

Twenty monks rang the Zygmunt bell at Krakow's Wawel Cathedral - the burial spot of Polish kings - a tolling reserved for times of profound importance or grief.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin personally took charge of the investigation and very quickly and publicly offered condolences, along with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

"On this difficult day the people of Russia stand with the Polish people," Medvedev said.

Other world leaders yesterday paid tribute to Kaczynski, who was elected in 2005. He and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, a former Prime Minister now in opposition, emerged from Poland's anti-communist Solidarity movement.

They have dominated Polish politics for the past decade, espousing a national conservative - and often anti-Russian - ideology.

Television showed Jaroslaw Kaczynski kneeling and praying at the crash site. Tusk, joined by Putin, placed a wreath at the site and knelt. When he stood up, Putin hugged him.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the world would be saddened and in sorrow as a result of the tragic deaths.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, said she was "deeply dismayed by the plane crash and the death of the Polish President", while France's President, Nicolas Sarkozy, hailed him as a "tireless defender" of liberty and "the fight against totalitarianism".

The subject of Katyn has for decades been a source of unresolved friction between Moscow and Warsaw. Recently, however, tensions had been easing, with Tusk and Putin attending a joint ceremony at Katyn last week.

"It is an accursed place," former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24 after the crash.

Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, said Kaczynski's death could fuel anti-Russian sentiments among some Poles.

"There will be certain people who'll say it was Russians who organised the whole thing," Lukyanov was quoted as saying.

Polish Parliament Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski is Acting President until elections can be held.

Among the fallen:

* President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria.

* Poland's Deputy Foreign Minister, Deputy Parliament Speaker, 12 members of Parliament.

* The head of the national bank, head of the National Security Office, Olympic Committee head, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides.

* The Army chief of staff, the Navy's chief commander and heads of the air and land forces, Army chaplain.

* Some on board were relatives of the officers slain in the Katyn massacre in World War II.

* Among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, whose firing in August 1980 from the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk sparked a workers' strike that spurred the eventual creation of the Solidarity freedom movement.

- OBSERVER, AP