The funeral of Polish president Lech Kaczynski could be postponed after the airport which is meant to handle most of the world leaders due to attend was shut today due to the volcanic ash cloud hanging over Europe.
The Polish president's funeral looks set to go ahead as planned this weekend at his family's insistence despite a cloud of volcanic ash that has shut Europe's airports and may prevent world leaders attending.
US president Barack Obama and Russia's Dmitry Medvedev are among dozens of leaders scheduled to travel to Krakow in southern Poland for Sunday's funeral of President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria, killed with 94 others in a plane crash in Russia last Saturday. They were travelling to attend a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre of over 20,000 Polish officers by Soviet secret police in Katyn forest when their plane went down.
Tens of thousands of mourners continued to file past the Kaczynskis' coffins in Warsaw's presidential palace today. Some had been waiting up to 18 hours to view the coffins, a measure of the grief felt by many Poles over the worst single disaster to strike their country since the second World War.
The heads of Poland's armed forces, its central bank governor and opposition lawmakers also perished when their ageing Tupolev plane crashed in thick fog while trying to land near Smolensk in western Russia.
Warsaw's picturesque Old Town, where the palace is located, has been transformed into a shrine for the dead, festooned with flowers, candles, crucifixes and white and red national flags.
The funeral plans hit an unexpected snag today when the volcanic ash cloud drifting over Europe from Iceland forced the closure of airports, including in Poland, stranding hundreds of thousands of travellers.
"I wish to say that the (Kaczynski) family's will is that the date of the funeral should not be postponed under any circumstances," presidential aide Jacek Sasin told reporters. Earlier, Mr Sasin had signalled the funeral might be delayed by Iceland's volcanic eruption and the disruption of air traffic.
In addition to Mr Obama and Mr Medvedev, German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Nicolas Sarkoy and Britain's Prince Charles are among dignitaries from an estimated 96 countries expected to attend the funeral.
Krakow's Balice airport, due to handle most arrivals, shut down today because of the volcanic ash cloud.
The decision to bury the Kaczynskis at Wawel, usually reserved for Poland's kings and national heroes, was already controversial. Some Poles believe Mr Kaczynski does not deserve such an honour and have staged noisy protests against the move.
Public support for Mr Kaczynski, a polarising nationalist and eurosceptic, had dwindled to just 20 per cent before his death. Polls showed he would have lost to Bronislaw Komorowski, the candidate of Prime Minister Donald Tusk's centrist Civic Platform, in a forthcoming presidential vote.
Mr Komorowski, who is also speaker of parliament, became acting president after Kaczynski's death. It is unclear who will now be his main rivals in an election likely to take place on June 20th.
Mr Kaczynski was the candidate of his twin brother Jaroslaw's right-wing Law and Justice (PiS). The candidate of the main leftist opposition party SLD also died in the crash.
Some Polish media have speculated that Mr Kaczynski, in his determination not to miss the Katyn event, may have ordered the pilot to try to land the plane against the Russians' advice.
Russian air traffic controllers in Smolensk say they urged the pilot to divert to another airport because of thick fog, but say he ignored the advice and made four attempts to land before hitting tree-tops and crashing.
Russia's Interfax news agency quoted senior aviation official Tatyana Anodina yesterday as saying the plane made only one attempt to land, contradicting the earlier reports.
"The conversations, their content, will be vital in terms of proving or disproving the various hypotheses. I will not oppose revealing the contents unless they are of an intimate nature," Andrzej Seremet, Poland's chief prosecutor, told Tok FM radio.
Interfax quoted what it said was a source close to the investigation commission saying the pilots did not seem to have been under pressure from Mr Kaczynski. "So far there is no evidence that any of the high-ranking passengers demanded that the pilots land at Smolensk. The voice recorder, whose decoding has been completed, did not register any pressure on the crew from their conversation," it said.
Russian investigators are decoding two cockpit voice recorders recovered from the Russian-made plane and a third Polish-made "black box" with flight data in it was to be returned to Poland yesterday, Polish agency PAP reported.
Speculation that Mr Kaczynski may have ordered the pilot to land in Smolensk is based in large part on an incident in 2008, when the president flew to Georgia to show his solidarity with that country during its brief war with Russia. Mr Kaczynski grew irate when his pilot refused to land in the capital Tbilisi because of safety concerns, later accusing him publicly of cowardice for diverting to Azerbaijan and even pushing for him to be fired.
Belarussian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has stormy relations with Warsaw after a crackdown on ethnic Poles, claimed Mr Kaczynski, as president, had the "final say" and was thus responsible for the crash, according to Interfax.