April 10 (Bloomberg) --
Polish President Lech Kaczynski and central bank Governor Slawomir Skrzypek were killed when their plane crashed today in heavy fog in western Russia, the Foreign Ministry said.
The 60 year-old president's wife, Maria, and several Polish officials also died in the crash, which happened as the aircraft was on approach for landing in Smolensk, according to ministry spokesman Piotr Paszkowski. There were 87 people on the passenger list and the ministry was trying to establish how many eventually boarded the Soviet-built Tupolev 154, he said. The plane was carrying 132 people, RIA Novosti reported.
Poland's central bank confirmed Skrzypek was on board, bank spokesman Maciej Antes told Bloomberg in a phone interview. Piotr Wiesiolek, a deputy governor of the central bank, will temporarily assume the duties of bank governor, Antes said.
Under Poland's constitution the duties of the president will be taken over by the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Bronislaw Komorowski.
Komorowski, who is the ruling party's candidate for president in elections due to be held later this year, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, are both travelling to Warsaw to handle the crisis. The government of the largest of the 10 former communist nations to join the European Union will hold an emergency cabinet meeting today in the "early afternoon", spokesman Pawel Gras told TVN24 television, which also showed footage of Poles lighting candles in town squares in several cities across the country as they began to mourn the tragedy.
Fourth Attempt
The plane clipped the tree line at about 10:50 a.m. in and broke in two as the pilot attempted a fourth landing amid heavy fog at a military airport near Smolensk, Russia, Rossiya-24 said, citing officials at the scene. Newswire RIA quoted an unnamed Russian security official as saying pilot error was a factor in the accident.
Rossiya-24 TV showed live footage of rescue workers attempting to extinguish pockets of fire among the wreckage almost two hours later at the airport, about 320 kilometers (200 miles) east of Moscow.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev dispatched Emergency Ministry Sergei Shoigu to the site of the crash and formed a special commission headed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to investigate the cause.
Sergei Antufiev, regional governor of Smolensk, said there were no survivors. "It clipped the tops of the trees, crashed down and broke into pieces," Antufiev told Russia-24 television news network by telephone.
The delegation was to attend a commemoration of thousands Poles and Russians killed in the spring of 1940 by Soviet forces under Josef Stalin at Katyn.
Ryszard Kaczorowski, the last Polish president in exile during World War II, the head of the Institute of National Remembrance Janusz Kurtyka and the Polish general chief of staff Franciszek Gagor were to be on the plane, according to a list of passengers obtained by PAP newswire.

TV grab from Russian TV channel NTV taken April 10, 2010 shows rescue workers at the site of the crash of the Poland Presidential TU-154 plane near the Smolensk airport.
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