WARSAW, Poland - Some 100,000 Poles filled Warsaw's biggest public square Saturday for a memorial and funeral Mass for the 96 people killed in a plane crash a week earlier.
The thickening cloud of volcanic ash over Europe caused some world leaders - including President Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper - to cancel plans to attend today's state funeral. Still, some European leaders said they would drive to Krakow.
Obama "waited as long as possible before he made the decision because he wanted to come," said Lee Feinstein, U.S. Ambassador to Poland. "But it was impossible for him to travel."
The crowd in Warsaw's Pilsudski Square waved white-and-red Polish flags with black ribbons of mourning affixed to them. A massive white stage, a large cross in the center, was flanked by oversized photos of the dead, including President Lech Kaczynski.
People are also reading…
The names of the dead were read aloud, starting with the president and his wife, Maria, while Marta, their only child, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the president's twin brother and former prime minister, looked on.
Others at the service included former President Lech Walesa, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and acting President Bronislaw Komorowski.
"Our world went crashing down for the second time at the same place," Komorowski said of the crash near Russia's Katyn Forest, site of a World War II massacre of Polish officers.
Tusk called the crash a calamity that was "the greatest tragedy in Poland since the war."
The crash claimed the lives of a swath of Poland's elite, including numerous lawmakers, the central bank governor, the commanders of the country's armed forces and the head of its Olympic committee, among others.
The coffins bearing Kaczynski and his wife were taken to a Gothic cathedral in Warsaw for an evening Mass, carried on artillery caissons pulled by army Humvees and escorted by Polish soldiers on foot and horse-riding cavalry.
After the Mass, their bodies will remain in the cathedral and then flown early today to Krakow aboard a military transport for the state funeral, said Presidential Palace spokesman Jacek Sasin.
The bodies of the first couple had lain in state in the Presidential Palace since Tuesday.
"During those few days when the palace was open, some 180,000 people came through" to pay their respects, he said.
Some waited in line as long as 14 hours.
