Mourners gather outside Presidential Palace, Warsaw

The body of the late President Lech Kaczynski arrived at Warsaw’s military airport, Sunday afternoon, and the coffin driven through streets lined with thousands of Poles wanting to pay their respects.

The coffin was removed from the CASA military aircraft which had taken it from Smolensk where the president’s plane crashed on Saturday. Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk and Metropolitan of Warsaw Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz were waiting on the tarmac to say mass.

At 15.24 CET the coffin, draped in the Polish flag, was placed on the airport’s apron and then visited and kissed by Lech Kaczynski’s tearful daughter, Marta, the late president’s twin brother Jaroslaw, acting head of state Bronislaw Komorowski, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and many other dignitaries and family who had gathered at the airport.

The coffin was placed in a funeral car and driven slowly through the streets of Warsaw to the chapel at the Presidential Palace. There the coffin will be open to public view, although not today, spokesman Jacek Sasin told TVP Info.

“For sure this will not happen on Sunday,” he said.

Sasin added that the date for President Kaczynski’s funeral has yet to be settled and is up to members of his family to decide.

Prime Minister Tusk has described the plane crash on Saturday in Smolensk, western Russia, as killing 96, as “a tragedy that the modern world has not seen before”. (pg/jb)