President Komorowski: photo - PAP/Jacek Turczyk
“It seems to me that all of the accusations against me are deeply unjust and unreasonable,” President Komorowski said after the reburial of Ryszard Kaczorowski, who died in the 2010 Smolensk air disaster but whose remains were put in the wrong grave after being labelled incorrectly.
Earlier, Mariusz Blaszczak MP, head of the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party in parliament, said that it was “a huge scandal” that neither the Polish president, nor Prime Minister Donald Tusk were among the mourners at the ceremony.
Kaczorowski was the last president in exile, a post created during WW II and continued, in residence in London, till the fall of communism, and was among 96 who died on 10 April 2010 and buried in the wrong grave, in Warsaw's Pawazki Cemetery, for two and a half years.
Blaszczak, whose party is lead by Jaroslaw Kaczynski – twin brother of the late president Lech Kaczynski, who also died in the Smolensk disaster – added that the authority of the president has been diminished by his absence and the public “require an explanation”.
Komorowski said that First Lady Anna Komorowski was at the ceremony, adding that it was decided beforehand that “state representation would be at a lower level” and that Kaczorowski's family had been consulted on the issue.
Karolina Kaczorowska's lawyer, Gniewomir Rokosz-Kuczyński, confirmed that the late president-in-exile's wife had been consulted about the level of representation at the re-burial.
“During this conversation, [Mrs Kaczorowska] agreed (with Bronislaw Komorowski) that the [second] funeral would be attended by the President's spouse, Anna Komorowska along with the head of the Presidential Chancellery Jacek Michalowski,” the lawyer told journalists, Monday.
President Komorowski said today that his presence at the ceremony would be a "political distraction" but that his relationship with Kaczorowski – president-in-exile during 1989 and 1990 - had always been "full of affection, warmth and intimacy." (pg)