Harper will attend Polish leader's funeral

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will travel to Krakow this weekend to attend a state funeral for Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria Kaczynska.

Kaczynski and his wife were among 96 people killed Saturday in a plane crash in western Russia.

"On behalf of all Canadians, the prime minister will express condolences and show Canada's solidarity to the Polish people during this time of great sorrow for the Polish people," Harper's spokesman Dimitri Soudas said in a release.

U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to travel to Poland on Sunday for the funeral, which will be held at Krakow's 1,000-year-old Wawel Cathedral. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are also expected to attend.

Grievers gather in Warsaw

On Tuesday, thousands of mourners in Warsaw tossed flowers onto a slow-moving hearse and joined an enormous viewing line at the presidential palace to pay their respects as the couple's bodies lie in state.

People knelt, prayed and cried before the first couple's coffins in the Columned Hall of the palace, where the president had appointed and dismissed governments.

Polish television broadcast live images of mourners walking past the closed coffins. Many were families with children, parents and grandparents. A pair of soldiers flanked each coffin.

Parliament held a special observance Tuesday in memory of the president and other politicians killed in the crash. In the assembly hall, flowers and framed portraits of the legislators bedecked their empty seats.

The names of the victims were read out. Senate Speaker Bogdan Borusewicz, his voice breaking, declared the crash the "greatest tragedy in Poland's postwar history."

Crash investigation continues

Investigators have suggested that human error may have caused for Saturday's crash. The 26-year-old Tupolev Tu-154 went down while trying to land in dense fog at Smolensk in western Russia. All aboard were killed, including dozens of Polish political, military and religious leaders.

They had been travelling in the Polish government-owned plane to attend a memorial in the Katyn Forest for thousands of Polish military officers executed by Soviet secret police in 1940.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said Tuesday the plane appeared to have been functioning normally.

"Judging by preliminary analysis of data from the black boxes, there was no explosion or fire aboard the plane, and the engines were working until the collision," Ivanov said in televised remarks.

Polish Prosecutor General Andrzej Seremet said Polish prosecutors were still reviewing data from the flight recorders and would discuss their findings Thursday.

Presidential vote

The date for early presidential elections in Poland will be announced on April 21. Elections were to have been held in the fall, but now a new vote must take place within another 60 days.

"If the date is not announced by Monday, then the elections will be held on June 20, according to the regulations," said Lech Czapla, who oversees parliament's administrative issues.

If no presidential candidate secures at least 50 per cent in the first round of balloting, a second round would take place two weeks later.