Polish president, 96 others killed in Russia plane crash

Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of Poland's key civilian and military leaders died Saturday when their chartered plane crashed, killing 97, as it came in for a landing in western Russia.

The 26-year-old Tupolev Tu-154 was enroute from Warsaw to Smolensk, Russia, when it went down in thick fog with the president, his wife, the army chief of staff, Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Kremer and the central bank governor aboard, said Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Piotr Pszkowski.

Initial reports put the number of people on board the plane at 132, but Russia's Emergency Ministry later corrected the total to 96, then 97 in its latest announcement.

The victims included a delegation of 88 Poles headed to Russia to attend events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre in Katyn forest of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

The body of President Kaczynski may have been found in the wreckage of the plane, a highly-placed police source told RIA Novosti.

Speaking from the scene, the source said however that additional tests, including DNA, would be needed to identify many of the bodies.

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. Most top government ministers were not aboard the plane.

Sergei Antufiev, governor of the Smolensk region,told Russia-24 television news network that the plane "clipped the tops of the trees, crashed down and broke into pieces."

Russian television showed the plane's wreckage scattered in a forest with parts still on fire. The plane's two black boxes have been found and are being analyzed by Russian investigators.

Andrei Yevseyenkov, a spokesman for the Smolensk government, said Russian dispatchers asked the crew to divert from Smolensk and land instead in Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus, or in Moscow because of the fog.

"The pilot was advised to land in Minsk, but decided to land in Smolensk," the spokesman said.

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.

A security source told the RIA Novosti news agency that human error was most likely to blame.

"A mistake by the crew during landing maneuvers has supposedly caused the crash," the source said.

The Interfax news agency cited the deputy head of Russian air force headquarters as saying air traffic controllers had advised the pilot not to land at the airport due to heavy fog, but the suggestion was ignored.

In a television address to the Polish people on Saturday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced April 12 a day of national mourning for the victims of the plane crash.

Medvedev stressed that he had ordered a thorough investigation of the causes of the crash.

"This work will be done in close interaction with corresponding Polish structures and agencies," he said. "All instructions have been given to this end."

Earlier in the day, Medvedev sent Minister for Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu to the crash site and ordered the establishment of an investigation committee headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Putin left for the crash site to meet with his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk, who was also enroute to Smolensk.

"The Polish premier wished to travel to the scene of the tragedy. I will go to meet him," Putin said. "We will visit the place of the crash together."

Putin said the bodies of the crash victims would be sent to Moscow for identification, and a special center would be established to help the victims' relatives from Poland.

Shoigu, who was at the site of the crash, said 97 bodies would be placed in coffins and taken to Moscow's Domodedovo airport.

"The bodies of those who died will be delivered to Moscow for identification," he said.

Both "black boxes have been found and examination on them have begun," Shoigu said.

The Russian Prosecutor General's investigations committee has opened an investigation into the crash.

"The investigation is looking into various theories...including unfavorable weather, human error, and technical malfunctions," the committee said in a statement.

Hours after the crash,the Polish government announced that there will be a presidential election before June in line with the country's constitution. According to the constitution, Parliament speaker Bronislaw Komorowski would take over presidential duties.

Tusk said Polish prosecutors were already in Smolensk and that he would probably host another cabinet meeting after returning to Warsaw late Saturday.

Komorowski declared a week of national mourning.

Some of the people on board the doomed plane were relatives of those 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. She went on to be a prominent member.

Kaczynski, 60, took office after winning an election run-off in October, 2005. Before that, he had been mayor of Warsaw, Poland's capital city.

The late president and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, were child movie stars who won fame in the 1962 movie "The Two Who Stole the Moon," about two troublemakers who try to get rich by stealing the moon and selling it.

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

Kaczynski, a Solidarity activist, became a senator in 1991 after serving as a representative to the National Assembly since 1989.

He had been the country's prosecutor-general and justice minister in a previous center-right government before being elected Warsaw mayor in 2002.

Kaczynski became well known for banning gay pride parades in Warsaw in 2004 and 2005, citing a lack of necessary documentation by organizers as the reason.

Kaczynski and Jaroslaw formed the socially conservative Law and Justice party in 2001 under the banner of developing the country's education and economy, fighting corruption and reforming rural areas.

According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154s, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service.

Poland has long discussed replacing the planes that carry the country's leaders but said they lacked the funds.

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.