(11 Apr 2010)
The coffin carrying the body of Polish President Lech Kaczynski was flown from the Russian city of Smolensk to Warsaw on Sunday.
The plane took off from the same airport where the president and 95 others had been attempting to land at on Saturday but crashed in thick fog during the descent.
Among the dead were Poland''s army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces.
Russia''s president Vladimir Putin stood solemnly next to the coffin in a short ceremony before the coffin was placed in a military plane.
Kaczynski''s coffin will be taken to the presidential palace after it arrives in Warsaw, the Polish government said. No date for a funeral has been set.
The party was headed to Smolensk to honour 22,000 Polish officers slain by the Soviet secret police in 1940 in the western Soviet Union.
The death of the president and much of the state and defence establishment in Russia, en route to commemorating one of the saddest events in the neighbouring nations'' long, complicated history, was laden with tragic overtones.
Polish-Russian relations had been improving recently after being poisoned for decades over the slaying of some 22,000 officers and others in Katyn forest and in other areas.
About 4,000 Polish army officers were killed in the forest by Josef Stalin''s NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, in 1940.
Russia never has formally apologised for the murders but Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin''s decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation.
Kaczynski wasn''t invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk.
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