Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country's highest military and civilian leaders died 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 on the 26-year-old Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre in Katyn forest of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police. The crash devastated the upper echelons of Poland's political and military establishments. 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. No foul play suspected Although initial signs pointed to an accident with no indication of foul play, the death of a Polish president and much of the Polish state and defense establishment in Russia en route to commemorating one of the saddest events in Poland's long, complicated history with Russia, was laden with tragic irony. Reflecting the grave sensibilities of the crash to relations between the two countries, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin personally assumed charge of the investigation. He was due in Smolensk later Saturday, where he would meet Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was flying in from Warsaw. “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.” Andrei Yevseyenkov, spokesman for the Smolensk regional government, said Russian dispatchers asked the crew to divert from the military airport in North Smolensk and land instead in Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus, or in Moscow because of the fog. Black boxes found Authorities have found both flight recorders from the plane that crashed Saturday in western Russia, killing Poland's president, Emergency Minister Sergei Shoigu said. “Both the data and the voice recorders were found at the crash site. The analysis of them, which will shed light on the reasons for the disaster, has already begun,” Shoigu was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency. Such recorders are often called “black boxes” and are used to reconstruct the chain of events that led to a crash. 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. “The crew made an independent decision to land in Smolensk,” Yevseyenkov said in televised remarks. Russia's Emergency Ministry said there were 96 dead, 88 of whom were part of the 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. Some of the people on board 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. “This is a great tragedy, a great shock to us all,” former president and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said. 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. 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. The plane tilted to the left before crashing, eyewitness Slawomir Sliwinski told state news channel Rossiya-24. He said there were two loud explosions when the aircraft hit the ground. 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.
