Polish President and Army Chief of Staff dead

[Jan Klimkowski]

My emphasis in bold at bottom of article:

'They were wiped out. It's our Katyn trauma all over again'

Poland struggles to come to terms with the loss of its president and dozens of senior officials in a plane crash near Smolensk airport

Waclaw Oszajca was struggling to come to terms with the full scale of his country's worst postwar tragedy. But as he clicked through portraits of the 96 victims of the Smolensk air crash on a news website a very personal story unfolded.

The voice of the 53-year old Jesuit priest and one of Poland's most respected theologians fell to a whisper as he pointed out the faces of friends, including a priest, a military chaplain, government aides and a historian.

"These were some of our best," said Oszajca, who yesterday took a train from his home in Lublin to Warsaw, to pay tribute to them on national radio. "They were wiped out in seconds. Young, old, women, men, leftwing, rightwing. It's our Katyn trauma all over again," he said.

The 1940 Soviet massacre of Poland's officer corps in the forests of Katyn remains one of the most harrowing events in 20th-century Polish history. In the bitterest of ironies the ill-fated delegation had been travelling to Katyn to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the massacre when its plane crashed in Smolensk, close to where the atrocities took place.

Yesterday's newspapers were already calling the tragedy the "second Katyn". Special editions were dominated by pictures of the late president, Lech Kaczynski, and his economist wife Maria.

(snip)

But while many were consumed with thoughts of what had been lost, others were seeking to lay blame. The fact that the Russian-made Tupolev 154 crashed in woods close to the site of the massacres has only helped to fuel conspiracy theories about the causes of the crash.

Russian and Polish investigators have recovered the flight-data recorders and are investigating the possibility that the plane's pilots ignored warnings that they were approaching Smolensk too low in thick fog.

But many Poles are already sceptical about the official version of events.

Arkadiusz Mularczyk, an MP for the Kaczynski's Law and Justice party, was one of several politicians who failed to get a seat on the plane. He travelled to Smolensk by train instead.

"It feels like God gave me another chance to live," he said. But he had unanswered questions. "I was already in the Katyn forest when the plane crashed, and the visibility was perfect, the sun was shining. So why didn't they let them land?" he asked.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr...-kaczynski