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Funeral of Polish president Lech Kaczynski faces delay over ash cloud

16 April 2010 20:27 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Many of the attendees, including Presidents Obama and Sarkozy, could have their plans disrupted by the Icelandic volcano, APA reports quoting â€œTimes Onlineâ€.

The volcanic ash cloud engulfing northern Europe is seriously disrupting arrangements for one of the most high-profile funerals ever staged in Poland.

President Obama, President Medvedev, a dozen other heads of state, the Prince of Wales and at least ten heads of government are due to touch down at Krakow airport on Sunday to pay respects to the late Polish President Kaczynski.

Meteorologists are predicting that the ash particles could still be influencing the safety of air travel by then. â€Even if it clears up by then, the US presidential visit could be in jeopardy,â€ said one official involved in the planning.

â€The US Secret service needs to get things set up well in advance but transantlantic flights have to come close to Iceland and thatâ€™s too risky.â€

Krakow and Warsaw airports were closed on Friday. Presidential aide Jacek Sasin said that postponing the funeral, either until late on Sunday or until Monday was a â€œvery serious alternative.â€

He said though that it was â€a purely hypothetical scenario and unlikely - thereâ€™s no plan as such.â€ Other members of the funeral preparation team tried to play down the prospect of a postponement, fearing that it would further confuse the arrangements for what is being billed as an informal â€œcongress of Europe.â€

There is concern that the Icelandic ash will upset the flight of Dimitry Medvedev too. He will be in the same Krakow chapel as President Saakashvili of Georgia (a Russian arch-enemy), President Peres of Israel, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Sarkozy of France and many others. There will be rivals, erstwhile enemies and uneasy allies.

The result has been a chaos of secret service activity with teams alreay de-bugging and staking out hotel suites in a hopelessly over-booked Krakow. Several units of the Polish army are being deployed.

Police responsible for a one-million strong memorial service in Warsaw on Saturday will be deployed overnight to Krakow where a million mourners are also expected.

The week of mourning since President Kaczynski died with 95 others, many of them senior officials, is already straining the resources of the state. Nato has lent Poland a special plane to transport the coffins.

The Polish authorities are evidently torn between wanting an international display of solidarity for their country - a recognition that Poland has become a heavy hitter - and nervousness about something going horribly wrong for a foreign leader in their airspace.

The irony would be terrible: since the crash last Saturday Poland has been thinking and talking about little else than air safety. The memory of that disaster is still very vivid as streams of hearses crawl slowly every day through the centre of the Polish capital.

Warsaw psychiatrists report that children in particular are suffering from the trauma, crying in school and having nightmares.

Leaks from the Russian-Polish investigation into the causes of the crash are also contributing to the tension. According to the Inter-state Aviation Committee in Russia the plane, flying through fog, hit some trees about 1,050 metres from the runway.

â€œAfter 200 metres, the left wing of the plane struck a tree, as a consequence of which the plane sharply heeled, and turned over to the left,â€ said the report, according to the Russian RIA Novosti news agency. â€The main mass of fragments of the airliner are about 300-350 metres from the runway and about 150 metres to the left of it.â€

Another leak suggests that the pilots knew that they were about to crash, some three seconds before impact. The Polish authorities have urged newspapers to wait until there has been a full analysis before publishing transcripts from the cabin of the doomed Tupolev 154.

The precise crash details are not expected to be released before next week - that is, after the funeral of all those who died in the presidential plane, including the flight crew.