WORLD NEWS

WARSAW: Polish President Lech Kaczynski will be laid to rest Saturday, a week after he died in an air crash in Russia along with his wife and dozens of top officials, a newspaper reported Monday.

The leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza said on its website that the government expected to hold Kaczynski's state funeral on Saturday.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is among the leaders aiming to attend, Gazeta Wyborcza quoted Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski as saying.

Former presidential aide Elzbieta Jakubiak said that ceremonies for Kaczynski and the 95 other victims of the weekend crash could last two days.

"But the final decision hasn't been taken. We're still waiting for all the bodies to be brought back to Poland," Jakubiak said.

Current presidential aide Jacek Sasin told a local news agency that members of staff from the offices of Kaczynski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk were to meet Monday to discuss plans for the funeral.

Kaczynski's is the only body to have been identified and brought back to Poland so far -- it was flown home Sunday afternoon.

The president is due to lie in state Tuesday, allowing Poles to pay personal tribute.

On Sunday tens of thousands of Poles lined the streets of Warsaw to mourn Kaczynski, as a hearse carrying his coffin wound its way slowly from a military airport to the presidential palace in the heart of the capital.

Huge crowds have been gathering since the president's aircraft crashed Saturday in the western Russian city of Smolensk. There were no survivors.

Besides the president and his wife Maria Kaczynska, dozens of other senior Polish political figures and military top brass perished.

The delegation had been due to attend a ceremony commemorating a 1940 Soviet massacre in the nearby Katyn forest of thousands of Poles captured in World War II.