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Plane goes down in Russia en route to commemoration of Stalin’s victims.

SMOLENSK, Russia - Polish President Lech Kaczynski and some of the country’s highest military and civilian leaders died on Saturday when the presidential plane crashed as it came in for a landing in thick fog in western Russia, killing 97, officials said.

Russian and Polish officials said there were no survivors on the 26-year-old Tupolev, which was taking the president, his wife and staff to events marking the 70th anniversary of the massacre in Katyn forest of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet secret police.

The crash devastated the upper echelons of Poland’s political and military establishments. On board were the army chief of staff, national bank president, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers, the Polish foreign ministry said.

Although initial signs pointed to an accident with no indication of foul play, the death of a Polish president and much of the Polish state and defense establishment in Russia en route to commemorating one of the saddest events in Poland’s long, complicated history with Russia, was laden with tragic irony.

Reflecting the grave sensibilities of the crash to relations between the two countries, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin personally assumed charge of the investigation. He was due in Smolensk later Saturday, where he would meet Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was flying in from Warsaw.

“This is unbelievable — this tragic, cursed Katyn,” Kaczynski’s predecessor, Aleksander Kwasniewski, said on TVN24 television.

It is “a cursed place, horrible symbolism,” he said. “It’s hard to believe. You get chills down your spine.”

Pilot ignored instructions
Andrei Yevseyenkov, spokesman for the Smolensk regional government, said Russian dispatchers asked the crew to divert from the military airport in North Smolensk and land instead in Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus, or in Moscow because of the fog.

While traffic controllers generally have the final word in whether it is safe for a plane to land, they can and do leave it to the pilots’ discretion.

Air Force Gen. Alexander Alyoshin confirmed that the pilot disregarded instructions to fly to another airfield.

“But they continued landing, and it ended, unfortunately, with a tragedy,” the Interfax news agency quoted Alyoshin as saying. He added that the pilot makes the final decision about whether to land.

Russia’s Emergency Minister Sergei Shoigu said there were 97 dead. His ministry said 88 of whom were part of the Polish state delegation. Poland’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Piotr Paszkowski, said there were 89 people on the passenger list but one person had not shown up for the roughly 1 1/2-hour flight from Warsaw’s main airport.

Some of the people on board were relatives of those slain in the Katyn massacre. Also among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, whose firing in August 1980 from the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk sparked a workers’ strike that spurred the eventual creation of the Solidarity freedom movement. She went on to be a prominent member.

“This is a great tragedy, a great shock to us all,” former president and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said.

U.S. President Barack Obama said the loss “is devastating to Poland, to the United States, and to the world.”

In a statement, Obama said: “President Kaczynski was a distinguished statesman who played a key role in the Solidarity movement, and he was widely admired in the United States as a leader dedicated to advancing freedom and human dignity. With him were many of Poland’s most distinguished civilian and military leaders who have helped to shape Poland’s inspiring democratic transformation. We join all the people of Poland in mourning their passing.”

The deaths were not expected to directly affect the functioning of Polish government: Poland’s president is commander in chief of its armed forces but the position’s domestic duties are chiefly symbolic. Most top government ministers were not aboard the plane.

Aging planes?
According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154s in the past four decades, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service, largely because the planes do not meet international noise restrictions and use too much fuel.

The aircraft was the workhorse of East Bloc civil aviation in the 1970s and 1980s, and many of the crashes have been attributed to the chaos that ensued after the breakup of the Soviet Unio

Poland has long discussed replacing the planes that carry the country’s leaders but said they lacked the funds.

The presidential plane was fully overhauled in December, the general director of the Aviakor aviation maintenance plant in Samara, Russia told Rossiya-24. The plant repaired the plane’s three engines, retrofitted electronic and navigation equipment and updated the interior, Alexei Gusev said. He said there could be no doubts that the plane was flightworthy.

The plane tilted to the left before crashing, eyewitness Slawomir Sliwinski told state news channel Rossiya-24. He said there were two loud explosions when the aircraft hit the ground.

Rossiya-24 showed footage from the crash site, with pieces of the plane scattered widely amid leafless trees and small fires burning in woods shrouded with fog. A tail fin with the red and white national colors of Poland stuck up from the debris.

The U.S. government said on Sunday it would resume military evacuation flights to the United States for badly injured Haitian earthquake victims after a four-day suspension over cost and treatment questions.

The White House said the flights were expected to begin again within 12 hours. Medical workers in Haiti had said the suspension put seriously injured patients at risk.

“Having received assurances that additional capacity exists both here and among our international partners, we determined that we can resume these critical flights,” White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement.

In another headache for U.S. officials, 10 Americans face a court hearing in Port-au-Prince on Monday after their arrest on suspicion of trafficking children.

The five men and five women from an Idaho-based charity deny wrongdoing after they were arrested trying to take 33 children to the neighboring Dominican Republic without documents proving adoptions had taken place or that the children were orphaned by the quake.

On a more positive note, food distribution to quake survivors, which has been chaotic at times in recent weeks, went more smoothly on Sunday using a coupon system that targeted women as recipients of the rations.

Nearly three weeks after the magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed up to 200,000 Haitians and left up to 1 million more homeless, a huge U.S.-led international relief operation has been struggling to help injured and hungry survivors.

Hundreds of patients have already been evacuated to the United States for treatment, most to Florida hospitals. But Florida’s governor had asked the federal government to share the burden, triggering a halt in the Medevac flights.

The White House statement on Sunday said patients were being identified for transfer, doctors were making sure it was safe for them to fly and that pediatric care was being prepared aboard the aircraft where needed.

The state of Florida is identifying hospitals to receive the patients, Vietor added.

He said Haiti’s government had estimated there were more than 200,000 injuries from the January 12 quake.

CHILD TRAFFICKING FEARS

Haitian authorities have held the 10 Americans from the New Life Children’s Refuge group in custody in Port-au-Prince since their arrest late on Friday at the Malpasse border crossing with the Dominican Republic.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said the Americans could face serious accusation.

“We did not arrest Americans, we arrested kidnappers,” Bellerive told Reuters. “We just hope that the people were acting in good faith and that they were doing what they were doing to try to help the children.”

Laura Silsby, a leader of the Idaho group, told CNN, “The truth ultimately is that we came here to help the children, and we know that God will reveal truth.” She earlier told Reuters the group had permission from the Dominican Republic to bring the children to an orphanage there.

The children have been taken to an orphanage in Haiti run by international aid group SOS Children’s Villages.

“All these children had no papers, no passports or anything and as the children came to us they were hungry, they were thirsty and the little baby was really dehydrated,” orphanage head George Willard said.

Bellerive told CNN in an interview broadcast on Sunday that he was worried about the risk of illegal adoptions and child trafficking. “We have already reports of a lot of trafficking (of children) and even of organ trafficking,” he said, while citing no specific cases.

A coupon-based system to feed the masses of homeless earthquake victims was expanded in Port-au-Prince on Sunday.

More than 200 U.S. troops fanned out around a sprawling refugee camp in the capital’s Champs de Mars plaza at dawn for the distribution of 1,650 bags of rice.

The rice was given only to women who had received numbered coupons from relief workers who had identified those most in need in the sprawling camp, said Jacques Montouroy of the Catholic Relief Services group running the distribution.

“You have to install discipline. … This is the only way for food to trickle down to everybody,” said Montouroy.

In recent weeks, some food handouts turned unruly and violent, with mobs of hungry, desperate quake survivors overwhelming aid workers and their U.N. peacekeeper escorts. Hard money training.

An American Airlines flight from Miami with more than 150 aboard overshot a runway while landing during a heavy rainstorm in Kingston on Tuesday night, injuring more than 40 people, officials said.

Flight 331 skidded across a road at Norman Manley International Airport and halted at the edge of the Caribbean Sea, apparently prevented from going into the water only by the upward slope of the sand. The nose of the jet was less than 10 feet from the water.

Some 44 passengers were taken to nearby hospitals with broken bones and back pains, Information Minister Daryl Vaz told The Associated Press. Four people were seriously injured, said Paul Hall, senior vice president of airport operations.

The plane’s fuselage was cracked, its right engine broke off from the impact and the left main landing gear collapsed, said Tim Smith, an American Airlines spokesman at the company’s headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. Most of the injuries were cuts and bruises and none were life threatening, though he had no further details, he said.

Some passengers leaving the plane were seen with cuts on their faces or bloody lips. Some looked visibly shaken as they bustled out of the terminal wrapped in red blankets, while others ducked under umbrellas to escape the heavy downpour.

The Boeing 737-800, which originated at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., had taken off from Miami International Airport at 8:52 p.m. and arrived in Kingston at 10:22 p.m. It was carrying 148 passengers and a crew of six, American said. The majority of those aboard were Jamaicans coming home for Christmas, Vaz said. Hard money training.