PERISHED: Polish president Lech Kaczynski has died, along with 95 others, after a Tupolev 154 jet similar to that pictured bottom, crashed in Russia.
Poland has suffered its worst political disaster since the second world
The fact that the president and so many of the Polish elite were on a visit to Russia will feature prominently in the fantastic stories being cooked up in cyberspace right now. And I can say with confidence that they are being cooked up, because Poland, like most East European countries, is obsessed with conspiracies. Russians, Jews, Americans, Freemasons – they will all be blamed.
The crash came as a staggering blow to Poland, killing what may be a tenth of country’s top leadership in one fiery explosion.
Those killed included Kaczynski's wife Maria, the army chief of staff, the head of the national bank, Poland's deputy foreign minister, three members of parliament, and at least two presidential aides, the Polish foreign ministry said. Rescuers today said they had found several bodies and were trying to identify them.
Kaczynski had been flying to Smolensk to attend the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, where Soviet secret police executed 15,000 Polish officers in one of the most notorious incidents of the second world war. In a further tragic twist, family members of the Katyn victims were on board the president's plane. Others were waiting at the airport to meet him.
Kaczynski is the first serving Polish leader to die since exiled second world war-era leader General Wladyslaw Sikorski in a plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943.
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