The body of Poland's president Lech Kaczynski has arrived back home as his stunned nation mourned the elite victims of a jet crash in Russia that has left intense focus on the pilots' last actions.
After observing a nationwide two-minute silence for the 96 dead, tens of thousands lined the route taken by the hearse from Warsaw airport to the presidential palace.
Draped in a red and white Polish flag, the coffin was met at the airport by a guard of honour and the president's identical twin Jaroslaw, a former prime minister.
The national anthem echoed across the tarmac and senior Catholic leaders said prayers for the victims who included top military, religious and state officials. Like many Poles, Kaczynski was deeply religious.
Kaczynski's adult daughter Marta knelt before her father's coffin. His twin brother then placed his hand briefly on the casket before making the sign of the cross.
Alongside them stood Kaczynski's long-time rival Prime Minister Donald Tusk and parliamentary speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, now acting head of state.
The coffin was then placed in a hearse as a military orchestra played the funeral march by Franco-Polish composer Frederic Chopin and driven slowly to the presidential palace past the huge crowds of mourners.
Poles had observed a two-minute silence on the stroke of midday. Motorists in Warsaw pulled over in the streets to stand in solemn attention while churches were packed at the start of a week-long national period of mourning.
In Russia, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was among those who attended a ceremony at the site of the crash near the western city of Smolensk before he watched the body of Kaczynski being placed on a Warsaw-bound plane.
As the Polish anthem was played, Putin laid red roses at the base of the stand bearing the coffin. A military bugle player sounded Taps, the solemn tune often played at state and military funerals, as Putin bowed his head.
All 96 people aboard the Tupolev Tu-154 jet were killed when it crashed into a forest and caught fire during thick fog on Saturday.
The dead included the president's wife Maria, whose remains have yet to be identified. "Otherwise, she would have been brought home with her husband," presidential spokesman Tomasz Brzezinski told AFP.
Putin is leading an official investigation into the crash, but Russian officials have already said the Polish pilots ignored air traffic control warnings that they were flying too low.
"The recordings that we have confirm that there were no technical problems with the plane," chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin told Putin at the crash site.
Fragments of the fuselage, air traffic control recordings and the plane's "black boxes" flight recorders are being studied, Russia's investigative committee said.
The Russian-built jet was taking the delegation to a memorial service for 22,000 Poles massacred on Stalin's orders by Soviet troops in 1940 when it hit tree tops in fog while approaching Smolensk airport.
Kaczynski's populist nationalism often made him a divisive figure at home and in Europe, but the nation united in grief.
"Regardless of whether one agreed with his politics, or his views -- and I didn't -- he was our president, and he died tragically," Andrzej Gerula, a computer programmer, said as he joined the throng lining the streets.
Besides the 60-year-old head of state and the first lady, the crash killed Poland's military chief of staff and the heads of the main services, its central bank governor, an archbishop and members of parliament.
Kaczynski's ailing 83-year-old mother has yet to be told of her son's death, as she remains in hospital with a heart ailment, Warsaw military hospital spokesman Colonel Piotr Dabrowiecki told AFP.
"Jadwiga Kaczynska is in a serious condition, albeit stable," he said. "She dozes and from time to time recovers consciousness."
Relatives of other victims flew from Warsaw to Moscow, where most of the bodies have been taken, after Russia waived visa regulations.
The weekend memorial service at Katyn forest was intended to help reconciliation between Poland and Russia, two decades after the end of the Cold War and the ensuing demise of communism.
Russia ordered a day of national mourning for Monday as hundreds showed their grief in Moscow by laying flowers outside the Polish embassy.
Polish communities around the world held their own special church services while global leaders expressed condolences, including US President Barack Obama who remembered "a distinguished statesman... dedicated to advancing freedom".
