Polish government starts payments to families of plane crash victims

Poland gives aid to kin of plane crash victims

WARSAW, Poland — Poland’s government has started providing financial help to families of the victims of the April 10 plane crash that killed the president and first lady, an official said Tuesday.

Eighty-seven families have so far gotten 40,000 zlotys ($13,800) each, and the government intends to provide additional help to families with children and widowed spouses without jobs, Interior Ministry spokeswoman Malgorzata Wozniak said.

Also Tuesday, prosecutors investigating the crash said it could take several months to determine the exact cause.

Poles are eager to understand exactly what caused the worst tragedy to strike the country since World War II. Officials have so far pointed to human error but Col. Zbigniew Drozdowski, one of the military investigators, told a news conference in Warsaw that all theories are still being considered.

The plane crash in Russia killed 96 people, including President Lech Kaczynski, his wife, Maria, and many other top civilian and military leaders headed to a memorial for 22,000 Poles killed by the Soviet secret police in 1940.

Kaczynski and his wife were buried in a historic Krakow cathedral on Sunday but funerals for many of the others are still taking place this week.

On Tuesday, 22 more people were being laid to rest, including Jerzy Szmajdzinski, a former defense minister who was to have run for an opposition party in presidential elections this fall.

With Kaczynski’s death, presidential elections originally due this fall have to be moved up to June. The exact date is to be set on Wednesday, though it is almost certain to be June 20.