Mourning in Warsaw

The body of Polish President Lech Kaczynski has returned to Warsaw, a day after the president and many of the country's political and cultural elite died in a plane crash in western Russia.

The president's twin brother Jaroslaw, Poland's Acting President Bronislaw Komorowski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk met the coffin at Warsaw's military airport, where it was draped in the national flag.

First to kneel before the coffin was Kaczynski's adult daughter Marta.

She was followed by the president's identical twin Jaroslaw, a former premier who now leads the conservative opposition. He placed his hand briefly on his dead brother's casket, before making the sign of the cross.

The coffin was then placed in a hearse as a military orchestra played the funeral march by 19th century Franco-Polish composer Frederic Chopin.

Grief-stricken nation

Tens of thousands of mourners turned out to pay their respects, tossing flowers as the hearse as it made its way to the presidential palace in Warsaw, where Kacynski's coffin is expected to lie in view.

"Regardless of whether one agreed with his politics, or his views - and I didn't - he was our president, and he died tragically," Andrzej Gerula, a 26-year-old computer programmer, told the AFP news agency.

"He deserves our respect and our homage. That's why I've come."

At noon, Poland observed two minutes of silence.

Millions of mourners across this staunchly Roman Catholic nation packed into churches all through Sunday to pray for the dead.

The remains of the other victims, including Poland's first lady and high-ranking cabinet members, were sent to Moscow for identification before being returned to Poland.

Poland will observe a week of mourning to commemorate the crash, which Prime Minister Donald Tusk has called the worst tragedy in Poland since World War Two.

Weather to blame?

In Moscow, an investigation into the crash continues, with authorities examining in-flight recordings for evidence of what caused the plane to come down just short of the runaway where it was trying to land.

So far, Russia says no technical glitches were to blame.

"The recordings that we have confirm there were no technical problems with the plane," said Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Prosecutor General's office.

Kaczynski and 95 others were killed when their ageing Tupolev plane crashed in thick fog near Smolensk in western Russia on Saturday, killing everyone on board.

The president was on en route to a memorial for the Katyn forest massacre, in which 22,000 Poles were murdered by the Soviet secret police during World War Two.

smh/dpa/AP/AFP/Reuters
Editor: Kyle James