Scottish Poles join a grieving nation in paying tribute to air crash victims

Published on Monday 12 April 2010 01:51

HUNDREDS of mourners from the Polish community in Scotland were united in grief at memorial services held in Edinburgh and Glasgow this weekend to mourn the tragic death of the Polish president.

• The touching scene of a sea of candles outside the presidential palace in Warsaw after the crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others

Services were held across the country after President Lech Kaczynski and dozens of political, military and religious leaders were killed in a plane crash on

Saturday.

In Glasgow about 300 people from the Polish community gathered together at St Simon's Catholic Church near Partick Bridge for a special service yesterday.

On Saturday afternoon prayers were said at St Peter's Catholic Church in Glasgow.

Prayers were also held at St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh yesterday.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien, the present Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh, also addressed the congregation in the packed cathedral.

Leslie Grembocki, 89, from Glasgow, who came to the UK during the Second World War and is the chairman of the Polish Combatants Association, said people had been saddened by the news. He added: "People here have different views and different politics but yesterday all that was put aside at the service for the president."

Libardo Castaneda, who moved from Poland to Scotland in 2002 and is studying at Napier University, added: "This situation has the potential to be explosive but I think the Polish community have conducted themselves with great dignity dealing with this tragedy."

In Warsaw yesterday tens of thousands of Poles softly sang the national anthem and tossed flowers at the hearse carrying the body of the president to the presidential palace.

The plane carrying Mr Kaczynski's body arrived from the Smolensk airport in Russia, where he and 95 others had been heading on Saturday to honour 22,000 Polish officers slain by the Soviet secret police in 1940 in the western Soviet Union.

The coffin bearing Mr Kaczynski's remains were met first by his daughter Marta, whose mother Maria also perished in the crash. She knelt before it, her forehead resting on the coffin.

She was followed by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the former prime minister, and the president's twin brother. He, too, knelt and pressed his head against the flag-draped coffin before rising slowly and crossing himself.

Standing sentinel were four Polish troopers bearing sabres.

There was no sign of the twins' ailing mother Jadwiga, who has been hospitalised.

The president had cancelled several foreign trips lately to be by her side.

The coffin was placed aboard a Mercedes hearse and slowly travelled several miles to the palace, watched by thousands of weeping Poles.

Earlier, the country held two minutes of silence in memorial for those killed in the crash.

Church bells pealed at noon and emergency sirens shrieked for nearly a minute before fading. Hundreds bowed their heads, eyes closed, in front of the presidential palace. Buses and trams halted in the streets.

No date for a funeral has been set and the presidential palace has not yet said if Mr Kaczynski will lie in state.