Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and...

The Soviet-made TU-154 carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski hit the top of trees as it attempted to land at a Smolensk airport on Saturday morning, killing all the 97 people on board the plane.

The plane was taking Kaczynski and a delegation of top Polish officials to a ceremony to pay tribute to some 20,000 Polish officers who were executed in Katyn and other locations by Soviet secret police in 1940. The Poles had been taken prisoner during the USSR"s invasion of Poland in the early days of World War Two.

"Katyn is claiming new victims," the head of the lower house of the Russian parliament"s international relations committee, Konstantin Kosachyov, earlier told RIA Novosti.

Soviet authorities refused to admit to the killings even after the death of Joseph Stalin, who had approved a suggestion by his secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria to execute the officers. It was not until 1990 that then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the Soviets, and not

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