Nation falls wordless as lamentation Poles symbol the flitting of Lech Kaczynski

Roger Boyes, Warsaw & ,}

Lech Kaczynski, the late President of Poland, returned home yesterday to a country struck reticent with pique and confusion.

The air pile-up that wiped out the head of state, the arch of the ubiquitous staff, the authority of the security services, the executive bank administrator and Solidarity heroes has left Poland reeling, fluid and uncertain.

As the red and white Polish dwindle on the Presidents box flapped in the wind, the honour ensure at Warsaw airfield struck up the National Anthem. The presidents ashen-faced identical tiwn hermit Jaroslaw, the Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, and parliamentarians advantageous sufficient not to have been on the cursed presidential plane, changed their lips to the difference of the anthem: Poland has yet to perish/As prolonged as we still live/That that unfamiliar force has seized/We at blade point shall retrieve.

Then, the box done the approach in a hearse by the streets of the wordless capital. Tens of thousands lined the route, rushing in front of the military escort to place carnations on the road, snatching off their hats, dropping to their knees.

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The usually noise: the revving of hundreds of municipal motorbike riders, fluttering the inhabitant flag, who had motionless casually to follow the cortege, similar to seagulls in the arise of a ferryboat.

Its a organisation trauma, pronounced a catering entrepreneur, Kaja Burakiewicz, were still struggling to understand.

The pile-up occurred on Saturday sunrise at Smolensk in horse opera Russia. The President had taken with him the thickk cream of Polish multitude to compensate reverence at the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacres: 22,000 officers and intellectuals, slaughtered in 1940, by Soviet NKVD troops.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, had formerly paid his respects to the victims - but had stopped short of an reparation - in a rite on Wednesday with his Polish counterpart, Mr Tusk. But President Kaczynski, distrusted and actively disliked by Russian politicians, had not been invited. The contentious 60-year-old was dynamic to have his own, second memorial use - and died in the attempt.

Some kin of the Katyn attempted murder victims had already done their approach on special trains to the old timberland clearings where the officers had been shot in the behind of the neck, one by one. Early yesterday they waited for the VIPs to arrive. There were rows on rows of dull seats.

The throng grew restless. A clergyman reported that the presidential craft had "technical difficulties" and the rite would be delayed. Slowly it dawned on the family groups - and on all Poles examination the live TV promote at home - that something distressing had happened.

A tragedy in a place already weighted by tragedy.

The place is cursed, pronounced ex-President Aleksander Kwasniewski. Throughout the weekend, the Poles square together the resources of the mess that is throwing up so most ungainly questions about the destiny of the country.

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