WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s president and first lady will be buried Sunday in a state funeral in Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral, the historic resting place of the country’s kings and former leaders, officials said.
Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria Kaczynska, were among 96 people killed Saturday in a plane crash in Western Russia. Investigators are pointing at human error as the cause.
Stanislaw Kracik, Krakow province governor, said the presidential couple will receive a funeral at 2 p.m. (1200 GMT) Sunday in the 1,000-year-old cathedral — the main burial site of Polish monarchs since the 14th century.
The last Polish leader killed in office, Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski, the exiled World War II leader who perished in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943, also is interred there.
Leaders expected for the funeral include Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.
Kaczynska’s body was flown home today from Russia, and Parliament held a special observance in memory of the president and lawmakers killed in the plane crash.
Her body, in a wooden casket draped with Poland’s white-and-red flag, arrived in a military CASA plane shortly after 10:30 a.m. at Warsaw’s Okecie airport. It was met by Kaczynska’s only child, Marta, and by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, her brother-in-law who was also the twin of the late president.
Her daughter knelt by the casket and wept as a Polish honor guard stood by silently.
Kaczynska’s body was then ferried to the Presidential Palace in the back of a Mercedes-Benz hearse, just like her husband’s was Sunday. Thousands of Warsaw residents lined the route.
“I’m here because it’s such a tragedy for Poland,” said Maja Jelenicka, 63. “I’m in despair. I feel as if I’ve lost a close relative. Maria Kaczynska was a wonderful woman, kind, with a heart of gold and a real first lady.”
The bodies of the first couple are lying in state in closed coffins in the Columned Hall of the Presidential Palace, where the president appointed and dismissed governments.
The body of Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last president of Poland’s government-in-exile in London, will be brought back on Wednesday and his coffin also will be put on public display, said Senate Speaker Bogdan Borusewicz, the top lawmaker in the Polish senate.
Investigators have suggested that human error may have been to blame in Saturday’s crash, saying Monday there were no technical problems with the Soviet-made plane.
The Tu-154 went down while trying to land in dense fog at Smolensk in western Russia. All aboard were killed.
They had been traveling in the Polish government-owned plane to attend a memorial in the nearby Katyn forest for thousands of Polish military officers executed 70 years ago by Josef Stalin’s secret police.
The pilot had been warned of bad weather in Smolensk, and was advised by traffic controllers to land elsewhere — which would have delayed the Katyn observances.
He was identified as Capt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk, 36, and the co-pilot as Maj. Robert Grzywna, 36. Also in the cockpit were Ensign Andrzej Michalak, 36, and Lt. Artur Zietek, 31.
Russian traffic controllers said the crew refused to follow their recommendations, a popular Russian daily reported.
Traffic controller Anatoly Muravyev, who was part of the team that handled the plane, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that the crew ignored their warnings about worsening weather at the Smolensk airport.
The crew “started landing with confidence and with no swerving,” Muravyev was quoted as saying. “But then the traffic controllers had doubts (about the weather).”
He said the head controller three times ordered the plane to re-attempt the landing and then advised the pilot to fly to another airport.
“The crew did not listen, although the controllers warned them about bad visibility and told them to get ready to fly to a reserve airport,” he said.
Polish Prosecutor General Andrzej Seremet said that Polish prosecutors were still reviewing data from the flight recorders and would discuss their findings Thursday when Chief Military Prosecutor Krzysztof Parulski returned to the country.
So far, 87 bodies have been recovered and 40 of them identified, Seremet said.
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