Polish leader, 95 others dead in Russia jet crash

MOSCOW – Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country’s highest military and civilian leaders died on Saturday when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia, killing 96, officials said.

Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors in the Soviet-era Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

On board were the army chief of staff, national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said.

Russia’s Emergency Ministry said there were 96 dead, 88 part of a Polish state delegation.

Poland’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Piotr Paszkowski, said there were 89 people on the passenger list but one person had not shown up for the roughly 1 1/2-hour flight from Warsaw’s main airport.

“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,” Paszkowski said. “We can assume with great certainty that all persons on board have been killed.”

The governor of the Smolensk region, where the crash took place about 11 a.m. (0700 GMT), also said no one survived.

State news channel Rossiya-24 showed footage from the crash site, with pieces of the plane scattered widely amid leafless trees and small fires burning in woods shrouded with fog. A tail fin with the red and white national colors of Poland stuck up from the debris.

“The Polish presidential plane did not make it to the runway while landing. Tentative findings indicate that it hit the treetops and fell apart,” regional governor Sergei Anufriev said on Rossiya-24. “Nobody has survived the disaster.”

The presidential Tu-154 was at least 20 years old. Polish officials have 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, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service.

The presidential plane was fully overhauled in December in Russia, the general director of the Aviakor plant in Samara 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.

Polish-Russian relations had been improving of late after being poisoned for decades over the Katyn massacre.

Russia never has formally apologized for the murders of some 22,000 Polish officers, but Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest near Katyn was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Rossiya-24 showed hundreds of people around the Katyn monument, many holding Polish flags, some weeping.

President Dmitry Medvedev sent his condolences and promised to work closely with Poland in investigating the crash.

“Russia shares the grief and mourning of Poland,” Medvedev said in a statement posted on the Kremlin Web site. “Please accept the most sincere condolences to the Polish people, words of compassion and support to relatives and friends of those who perished.”

Putin has been put in charge of a commission investigating the crash, the Kremlin said.

In Warsaw, Prime Minister Donald Tusk called an extraordinary meeting of his Cabinet and the national flag was lowered to half-staff at the presidential palace, where people gathered to lay flowers and light candles.

Black ribbons appeared in some windows in the Polish capital.

Poland’s president is commander in chief of its armed forces but the position’s domestic duties are chiefly symbolic. Kaczynski, 60, became president in December 2005 after defeating Tusk in that year’s presidential vote.