Polish President Lech Kaczyński, along with 95 others, died this weekend in a tragic plane crash en route to commemorate victims of the Katyn massacre during the Second World War. The European Parliament, led by Pole Jerzy Buzek, went ahead with a planned

Flash: Remembering Poland's tragedy in Brussels

https://api.multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/documents/20125/15188362/N002-100412-EN.srt

with the Polish and European flags   and a screen listing the dead.

Writing his own tribute, EP President   Buzek, who knew President Kaczyński

and others killed in the   plane crash in Russia.

Our friendship started   in Solidarity times in the 1980s,

Some of them I met for the first time   in the Polish parliament.

President Kaczyński, his wife, political,   military and church leaders died

when their plane crashed   in Russia’s Katyn Forest.

They had come to join Russian leaders   in commemorating the murder

by Soviet forces of 22,000 Polish officers   70 years ago.

but some hope a less confrontational   kind of politics will emerge.

We don’t know how much we are   learning now from this process,

whether we will be able in Poland to move   towards a more gentle political language,

The President’s body has been   flown back to a shocked country.

Now Presidential elections   will be held in June.

The one compensation   is that now the world knows

Finally we got the truth,   we can communicate it to the world.

The commemoration aimed to   bring Russia and Poland together;

Jerzy Buzek hopes that the tragedy   will help achieve that.

I hope it will also be a very good reason   for future reconciliation

At the EP an exhibition to mark the Katyn   massacre will go ahead as planned,

but it will now also commemorate   this latest tragedy,

which killed many of Poland’s   political and military leaders.