WARSAW, Poland, April 11, (Agencies): Tens of thousands of Poles softly sang the national anthem and tossed flowers at the hearse carrying the body of President Lech Kaczynski to the presidential palace on 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 honor 22,000 Polish officers slain by the Soviet secret police in 1940 in the western Soviet Union.
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 sabers.
Meanwhile, the body of Poland’s first lady Maria Kaczynska remains unidentified an aide said Sunday.
“It has not been possible to identify the body of Maria Kaczynska. Otherwise, she would have been brought home with her husband,” presidential spokesman Tomasz Brzezinski told AFP.
“I’d have thought there’d be two coffins, the president’s and his wife Maria Kaczynska’s. They were always together in life, and I think the president would have wanted his wife to be with him even on this journey,” Zuzanna Skarzewska, 24, told AFP.
Kaczynska, who died aged 59, married Kaczynski in 1978.
There was no sign of the twins’ ailing mother Jadwiga, who has been hospitalized. The president had canceled several foreign trips lately to be by her side.
The coffin was placed aboard a Mercedes-Benz hearse and slowly traveled several miles 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 defense establishment in Russia, en route to commemorating one of the saddest events in the neighboring nations’ 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 his sacrifice there at that tragic place,” said mourner Boguslaw Staron, 70.
Among the dead were Poland’s 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 deputy head of the National Bank of Poland, Piotr Wiesiolek.
He said the bank’s Monetary Policy Council will hold a meeting on 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 neighboring 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.”
Some on board were relatives of the officers slain in the Katyn massacre. Also 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.
Walesa was among those who signed a condolence book in Gdansk.
“The elite of our country has perished,” he said the day before.
Children also placed simple drawings and messages of mourning: “I love our president,” said one, alongside a picture of a human figure and a cross.
Polish television carried black-and-white montages of those killed in the crash and devoted nonstop coverage to the crash, including lingering looks at Kaczynski and his wife, Maria.
“I couldn’t stay alone with my tears,” said Alla as she gathered Sunday with hundreds of fellow Russians to mourn and pray for Poland’s president and 95 others killed in a weekend jet crash.
“I feel stronger here,” she said, queuing behind dozens of others to sign a book of condolences at the Polish embassy in Moscow.
One man read from a prayerbook, while a steady stream of mourners crossed themselves and wiped away tears outside the embassy’s gates, amid a sea of flowers and flickering red candles.
“Brothers, we grieve together with you,” read a note on one bouquet that was simply signed “Muscovites.”
Clutching a bunch of roses, Marina Shishkina said it was crucial for Russians to show they shared Poland’s grief.
“It’s a real tragedy there, people are crying. I think it’s really good on a human level that Russian people are coming here,” she told AFP. “This tragedy is hard to even fathom.”
Choking on tears, Irina Vlasova said the crash had hit her as if it were her own family had been on the ill-fated flight: “It’s hard for me to speak. This tragedy has touched me as if it happened to relatives.”
“It was impossible for me not to come here and lay flowers,” she added.
Hundreds crowded in for a memorial mass at Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the main Roman Catholic Church in this predominantly Orthodox city, standing in the aisles and at the back for the Polish-language service.
Investigators
Russian investigators Sunday ruled out technical faults as a cause of the plane crash that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski, adding to speculation that pilot error was to blame.
“The recordings that we have confirm that there were no technical problems with the plane,” Russia’s chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin said in a televised meeting with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Recordings of the plane’s communications with air traffic control revealed the pilot had been warned that thick fog over the airport created precarious landing conditions, but landed anyway, Bastrykin said.
“The pilot was informed about complex weather conditions but nevertheless made a decision to land,” Bastrykin, the head of Russia’s investigative committee, told Putin at their meeting near the site of the crash.
Bastrykin added, however, that evidence from the plane’s flight data and voice recorders would be studied in greater detail in Moscow.
He also said Polish prosecutors were participating in the probe into the crash, which took place Saturday when Kaczynski’s Tu-154 jet was trying to land at the city of Smolensk in western Russia, killing all 96 people aboard.
Bastrykin’s comments came after reports that pilot error was being examined as a possible cause, and a Russian air force general said the plane’s crew had ignored instructions to turn back from air traffic control.
Eyewitnesses said Kaczynski’s Soviet-built plane attempted to land several times amid thick fog, before clipping treetops en route to the runway and breaking up in a fiery crash.
Russia’s investigative committee earlier said it was cooperating closely with its Polish counterparts to determine the cause of the crash.
“Along with Russian law enforcement agencies, 11 Polish colleagues are working at the scene of the crash of the Polish president’s Tu-154,” the committee said in a statement.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has vowed a “thorough” probe into the crash, while Putin pledged Russia would work swiftly to determine the cause.