Global General

Profile: Polish President Lech Kaczynski

(Agencies)
Updated: 2010-04-10 17:48

WARSAW: A plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski crashed near the Smolensk airport in western Russia Saturday, killing the president and all 132 people on board.

Lech Kaczynski, took office after winning the presidential election run-off in October, 2005. Before that, he was Mayor of the country's capital city Warsaw.

Kaczynski was born in Warsaw in June, 1949. He and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, are child movie stars who won fame in the 1962 movie "The Two Who Stole the Moon," about two troublemakers who try to get rich by stealing the moon and selling it.

Kaczynski, 60, had been a law professor at Gdansk University from 1991 to 1997. Later he taught at the Law School of Warsaw University, where he graduated in 1971.

The president, a Solidarity activist, became a senator in 1991 after serving as a representative to the National Assembly since 1989.

He had been the country's prosecutor-general and justice minister in a previous center-right government before he was elected the mayor of Warsaw in 2002.

Kaczynski became well known for he banned the Warsaw gay movement parade in 2004 and 2005, locally known as the Parada Rownosci, stating the lack of necessary documentation by organizers as the reason.

Kaczynski and Jaroslaw formed the socially conservative Law and Justice party in 2001 under the banner of developing the country's education and economy, fighting corruption and reforming rural areas.

He was married to an economist and has one daughter.