Thread: Polish president, 96 others, killed in plane crash

Polish president killed in plane crash

April 10, 2010 1:01 p.m. EDT

(CNN) -- Polish President Lech Kaczynski was killed early Saturday along with his wife, several top military officials, and the head of the national bank when their plane crashed at a western Russian airport, officials said.

"There are no survivors," said Sergey Antufyev, the governor of Smolensk, where the plane was trying to land when it crashed. Russian emergency officials said 97 people died. Kaczynski was 60.

Parliament Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski took over as acting president and declared it "a time for national mourning."

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the country would hold two minutes of silence at midday Sunday for the victims. Russia has declared Monday as a day of mourning.

World leaders pay tribute to Kaczynski

Kaczynski had been traveling with the Polish delegation to Russia for the 70th anniversary of the massacre of Polish prisoners of war in the village of Katyn. Some 20,000 Polish officers were executed there during World War II.

The Polish military plane originated in Warsaw, the Polish Defense Ministry said. It was approaching the airport at Smolensk -- just a few miles east of Katyn -- and probably hit some trees at the end of the runway, said Piotr Paszkowski, a spokesman for the Polish Foreign Ministry.

The Investigation Committee of the Russian prosecutor's office said the plane, a Tupolev-154, was trying to land in heavy fog.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev appointed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to head an inquiry commission and sent Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu to the scene of the crash, the Kremlin said.

The flight recorders were found Saturday afternoon the Interfax news agency reported. "The flight recorders have been discovered. Their examination has already begun and it should shed light on the causes of the accident," Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu said.

"The trajectory of the flight, which I traced twice today, indicates that there was a deviation from the runway, not only in terms of altitude, but also width of no less than 150 meters," Shoigu said.

Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party released a list of some of those it said were killed in the crash.

Biography: Lech Kaczynski

They included Aleksander Szczyglo, the head of the National Security Office; Jerzy Szmajdzinski, the deputy parliament speaker; Andrzej Kremer, the deputy foreign minister; and Gen. Franciszek Gagor, the army chief of staff, according to the party. The party also said that Slawomir Skrzypek, head of the National Bank of Poland, was killed.

"The entire top military brass, including the chief of defense and all the services, were on the plane," said Tomas Valasek, of the Center for European Reform.

"If that is true, then you're looking at a situation, in effect, of the decapitation of the military services."

What does plane crash mean for Poland?

Pictures from the scene showed parts of the airplane charred and strewn through a wooded area. Some pieces, including one of the wheel wells, were upside down.

The crash happened around 10:50 a.m. (2:50 a.m. ET) on the outskirts of the town of Pechorsk, just outside of Smolensk, the Investigation Committee said.

The plane was refurbished and repaired last year, according to the general director of the company that performed the service. Alexei Gusev, the general director of Aviakor Factory, told CNN that the plane received major refurbishing and repair in December 2009.

This is a time of great national tragedy. At this time there are no political differences, left or right. This is a time of national mourning

The work included rebuilding all of the engines, he said. His company also provided the Polish government with repair and maintenance parts for the next six years.

"The plane has been in use very little since that major repair," he said. "Speaking openly, we believe that this tragedy could not have been caused by equipment failure."

"This is a time of great national tragedy," Komorowski told reporters. "At this time there are no political differences, left or right. This is a time of national mourning."

Kaczynski had been president since December 2005 after he defeated rival Tusk in the second round of voting.

The two men did not have a good relationship. In Parliamentary elections in 2007, Tusk's Civic Platform beat the Law and Justice Party of Kaczynski's twin brother, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who was prime minister at the time.

Tusk put any political differences aside as he spoke to the nation Saturday.

"I wanted, in the name of all the Polish people, to pass words of condolences to the familiy of the Polish president, to his daughter, to his mother, to his brother, and to all the families of all the victims," Tusk said.

Crowds gathered at the presidential palace in Warsaw to lay flowers and light candles for the president, whose death raises questions for Poland's government.

"Everything has changed today," said Jan Mikruta, a reporter for TV Polsat.

Tusk and Polish Cabinet ministers were holding a special meeting Saturday morning to discuss the situation, said a spokeswoman for the Polish Parliament, who declined to be named because she was not authorized to speak publicly.

Elections must now be held within 60 days, said Dariusz Rosati, Poland's former foreign minister.

"There is going to be a huge gap in public life in Poland," said resident Magdalena Hendrysiak. "The most important people are dead."

At the same time, Hendrysiak said, the president's death may have a unifying effect.

"I think it will be one of those situations that no one will care about their political preferences," she told CNN. "I think we're going to end up as pretty united in the face of such a tragedy."

Valasek pointed out, however, that the Polish president is the head of state, not head of government -- meaning essential services will continue to run.

"The role of the Polish president is not quite ceremonial ... he has some very real powers, but at the end of the day, the day-to-day running of the government is in the hands of the prime minister and the (cabinet) ministers," Valasek said. "Continuity is assured in ways that would not necessarily be assured in the case of the death of the U.S. president."

Tusk said that as head of the government, he will take care of the families of the victims and handle the investigations.

"We won't extinguish the pain, but we have our duties, and the Polish state must function and will function," Tusk said.

He appealed to everyone in Poland to "behave in an appropriate way" during the time of mourning.

Condolences poured in from around the world Saturday, including from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Britain's Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles.

U.S. President Barack Obama, said: "President Kaczynski was a distinguished statesman who played a key role in the Solidarity movement, and he was widely admired in the United States as a leader dedicated to advancing freedom and human dignity.

"With him were many of Poland's most distinguished civilian and military leaders who have helped to shape Poland's inspiring democratic transformation. We join all the people of Poland in mourning their passing."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he learned of Kaczynski's death with "great emotion and a deep sadness" and expressed his sympathy to the families of the president and other victims.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai also expressed his condolences, as did the chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

"I offer my deepest condolences to the Polish people and to the families of those killed in this tragic accident. Our hearts go out to you in this difficult time," said OSCE Chairman Kanat Saudabayev, who is also the secretary of state and foreign minister of Kazakhstan.

Valasek said the crash is a tragic coincidence, since the Polish officials were on their way to commemorate the deaths of top Polish officials at Katyn 70 years ago.

"The very fact that he was on his way to (commemorate) the massacre suggested that Polish-Russian relations, which of course had been very poor over the past 20 years, were on the way towards improvement," Valasek said.

"A shared tragedy of this sort could give a boost to further improvement in Polish-Russian relations, which ... were on the mend, and this tragedy might accelerate that trend."

The partial list of those killed published on the Web site of President Lech Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party includes:

Lech Kaczynski -- Polish president

Maria Kaczynska -- The president's wife

Ryszard Kaczorowski -- Poland's last president-in-exile

Aleksander Szczyglo -- head of the National Security Office

Pawel Wypych -- presidential aide

Mariusz Handzlik -- presidential aide

Jerzy Szmajdzinski -- deputy parliament speaker

Andrzej Kremer -- Deputy Foreign Minister

Gen. Franciszek Gagor -- head of the army chief of staff

Andrzej Przewoznik -- minister in charge of WWII memorials

Slawomir Skrzypek -- head of the National Bank of Poland

Janusz Kurtyka -- head of the National Remembrance Institute

Przemyslaw Gosiewski -- lawmaker

Zbigniew Wassermann -- lawmaker

Grzegorz Dolniak -- lawmaker

Janusz Kochanowski -- civil rights commissioner

Bishop Tadeusz Ploski -- army chaplain

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/04 ... gletoolbar

Polish leader, 96 others dead in Russia jet crash

Updated 14m ago

MOSCOW (AP) — An aging Russian airliner carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and members of his country's military, political and church elites crashed in thick fog Saturday as it took them to a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the slaughter of thousands of Polish military officers by Soviet secret police.

Poles wept before their televisions, lowered flags to half-staff and taped black ribbons in their windows after hearing that the upper echelons of the establishment lay dead in woods a short drive from the site of the Katyn forest massacre, one of Poland's greatest national traumas.

Thousands of people, many in tears, placed candles and flowers at the presidential palace in central Warsaw. Many called the crash Poland's worst disaster since World War II.

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.

The crash also shocked Russia. Sensing the depth of the tragedy for Poland, 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, according to the Kremlin press service.

CONDOLENCES: President Obama expresses sympathy

Chunks of the plane were scattered widely amid leafless trees and small fires in woods shrouded with fog. A tail fin with the red and white national colors of Poland stuck up from the smoking debris. Early indications pointed to pilot error in heavy fog as a factor in the crash, officials said.

On board were the national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, Olympic Committee head, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said. Kaczynski's wife, Maria, also died.

"This is unbelievable — this tragic, cursed Katyn," Kaczynski's predecessor, Aleksander Kwasniewski, said on TVN24 television.

It is "a cursed place, horrible symbolism," he said. "It's hard to believe. You get chills down your spine."

The Polish military suffered the deepest losses. Among the dead were the army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces, who were all making the emotional trip to honor the Polish officers slain by the NKVD, the acronym for the Soviet secret police at the time of the murders in 1940.

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.

"This is a great tragedy, a great shock to us all," former president and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said.

Polish Parliament Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, who became acting president, addressed his country on television: "Poland is in mourning, we have suffered a dramatically painful loss."

He said he would announce early elections within 14 days of the president's death, in line with the constitution. The vote must be held within another 60 days.

Russia's Emergency Ministry said there were 97 dead, 88 in the Polish state delegation. Poland's Foreign Ministry said there were 89 people on the passenger list but one had not shown up for the roughly 1 1/2-hour flight from Warsaw's main airport.

Poland called for two minutes of silence across the country Sunday and declared a week of mourning. Medevedev declared Monday a day of mourning in Russia.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk flew to Smolensk from Warsaw. The president's twin brother, former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, headed to the area in a chartered plane along with relatives, according to his party.

In the village of Gorzno, in northern Poland, the streets were largely empty as people stayed home to watch television.

"It is very symbolic that they were flying to pay homage to so many murdered Poles," said resident Waleria Gess, 73.

The deaths were not expected to directly affect the functioning of Polish government: Poland's president is commander in chief of its armed forces but the position's domestic duties are chiefly symbolic. No top government ministers were aboard the plane.

Polish-Russian relations had been improving recently after being poisoned for decades over the massacre of some 22,000 Polish officers in and around Katyn forest.

Russia never has formally apologized for the murders but Putin's decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Kaczynski wasn't invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Tusk.

Rossiya-24 showed hundreds of people around the Katyn monument, many holding Polish flags, some weeping.

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

The president was a conservative and a lifelong skeptic of Russia with many detractors at home and abroad. Condolences from world leaders paid tribute to his patriotism and defense of freedom during Communist rule in Poland.

Putin and Medvedev promised Tusk they would work closely with Poland in investigating the crash. Initial signs pointed to an accident, possibly due to the fog that is very common in the area in spring and fall, as well as pilot error.

Both black boxes have been found. Preliminary data indicated that the plane hit the treetops as it was making the approach to the airport in poor visibility, the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Marina Gridneva, an official with the Russian general prosecutor's office, as saying.

Andrei Yevseyenkov, spokesman for the Smolensk regional government, said Russian dispatchers had asked the Polish crew to divert from the military airport in North Smolensk and land instead in Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus, or in Moscow to the east because of the fog.

While traffic controllers generally have the final word in whether it is safe for a plane to land, they can and do leave it to the pilots' discretion. Air Force Gen. Alexander Alyoshin confirmed that the pilot disregarded instructions to fly to another airfield. The Smolensk airfield is not equipped with an instrument landing system to guide planes to the ground.

"But they continued landing, and it ended, unfortunately, with a tragedy," Alyoshin said. He added that the pilot makes the final decision about whether to land.

The Tu-154 was the workhorse of East Bloc civil aviation in the 1970s and 1980s. Poland has long discussed replacing the planes that carry the country's leaders but said they lacked the funds.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154s in the past four decades, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service, largely because the planes do not meet international noise restrictions and use too much fuel.

The presidential plane was fully overhauled in December, the general director of the Aviakor aviation maintenance plant in Samara, Russia told Rossiya-24. The plant repaired the plane's three engines, retrofitted electronic and navigation equipment and updated the interior, Alexei Gusev said. He said there could be no doubts that the plane was flightworthy.

Kacyznski became president in December 2005 after defeating Tusk in that year's presidential vote.

The nationalist conservative had said he would seek a second term in presidential elections this fall. He was expected to face an uphill struggle against Komorowski, the candidate of Tusk's governing Civic Platform party.

Poland has become a firm U.S. ally in the region since the fall of communism — a stance that crosses party lines.

The European Union member nation of 38 million people sent troops to the U.S.-led war in Iraq and recently boosted its contingent in Afghanistan to some 2,600 soldiers.

U.S. Patriot missiles are expected to be deployed in Poland this year. That was a Polish condition for a 2008 deal — backed by both Kaczynski and Tusk — to host long-range missile defense interceptors.

The deal, which was struck by the Bush administration, angered Russia and was later reconfigured under President Barack Obama's administration.

Under the Obama plan, Poland would host a different type of missile defense interceptors as part of a more mobile system and at a later date, probably not until 2018.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2010 ... lled_N.htm