Plane Crash Kills Polish President

It appears that his plane crashed in a heavy fog, while attempting to land in Smolensk, killing Poland's president, Lech Kaczynski.

He was on his way to the Katyn Woods, where Polish and Russian authorities were to have a memorial service for the Polish officers and politicians murdered by the NKVD in 1940, which is kind of ironic:

Russian emergency officials said 97 people were killed. They included Poland’s deputy foreign minister and a dozen members of Parliament, the chiefs of the army and the navy, and the president of the national bank. They included Anna Walentynowicz, 80, the former dock worker whose firing in 1980 set off the Solidarity strike that ultimately overthrew Polish Communism, as well as relatives of victims of the massacre that they were on their way to commemorate.

…………

Among them, the Polish government said, were Mr. Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; Ryszard Kaczorowski, who led a government in exile during the Communist era; the deputy speaker of Poland’s Parliament, Jerzy Szmajdzinski; the head of the president’s chancellery, Wladyslaw Stasiak; the head of the National Security Bureau, Aleksander Szczyglo; the deputy minister of foreign affairs, Andrzej Kremer; the chief of the general staff of the Polish Army, Franciszek Gagor; the president of Poland’s national bank, Slawomir Skrzypek; and the commissioner for civil rights protection, Janusz Kochanowski.

My condolences to the victims families.

Note that President is a mostly ceremonial position under the Polish system, though a quick search through my archives seems to indicate that he was a bit of a euro-skeptic.