Presidential funeral

Thousands of grieving Poles formed long lines to pay their respects to Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife Maria Kaczynska on Tuesday.

The president and his wife will lie in state in closed caskets at the presidential palace in Warsaw until they are buried on Sunday.

"The memorial service is planned for Saturday and it follows that the burial of the presidential couple will take place on Sunday," Jacek Sasin, the deputy chief of the presidency, told Polish public radio.

The remains of Kaczynski's wife, Maria, were flown out of Moscow's Domodedovo airport after being identified late on Monday. The bodies of 30 other victims are expected to be flown home later Wednesday, the first to be repatriated, apart from the Kaczynskis, since the presidential jet crashed in western Russia in thick fog on Saturday.

All 96 passengers aboard the plane were killed, most of them senior government and military officials en route to a memorial service to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre by Soviet forces in World War II.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has personally taken charge of the crash probe, as investigators point to pilot error as the cause of the accident.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Horst Koehler of Germany have announced they will attend Sunday's funeral at Wawal Castle in Krakow, along with other world leaders including Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Barack Obama of the United States.

Several hundred people gathered in Krakow on Tuesday to protest against the decision to bury Kaczynski and his wife at the city's historic cathedral. The church houses the tombs of former Polish kings and the founding father of the Polish republic, Jozef Pilsudski, who died in 1935.

gb/AFP/Reuters/dpa
Editor: Martin Kuebler