Security clampdown in Poland for Pope Benedict XVI

May 24, 2006, 13:36 GMT

Warsaw - Tight security was taking shape Wednesday in Poland ahead of the arrival Thursday morning of Pope Benedict XVI in Warsaw for his first formal four-day-long papal pilgrimage abroad.

Officials were expected to close Polish airspace prior to the pontiff's 11:00 a.m. CET arrival at Warsaw's Frederick Chopin International Airport Thursday morning. A NATO aircraft equipped with a high-powered AWACS radar will also monitor his arrival in the air, according to Polish Radio.

Civilians will also be banned from carrying firearms while the pontiff is visiting.

Wide-ranging parking restrictions were enforced in Warsaw city- centre Wednesday. The capital expects a flood of around a million faithful into its central Pilsudski Square for a papal mass Friday morning. The same vehicle restrictions will apply to other cities and towns the pope will visit, namely Czestochowa, Wadowice, Krakow and Oswiecim.

Prohibition will also be in force. This means the government- imposed ban on alcohol sales will last Thursday and Friday in Warsaw, Friday in Czestochowa and Saturday and Sunday in Krakow.

Officials insist the alcohol bans will help maintain public order during mass outdoor religious celebrations in both Warsaw and Krakow. Events in either city are expected to draw well over a million faithful.

However, Pope Benedict XVI himself and top Polish church as well as government officials will be treated to both red and white wine at gala dinners during the visit, according to local media reports.

An unmanned balloon equipped with a high-powered remote-control surveillance camera will allow security services to monitor Krakow's sprawling Blonie meadow Sunday during a special papal Sunday mass which more than a million faithful are expected to attend.

Elected pontiff in April 2005 after the death of Polish-born Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI will arrive in the Polish capital Warsaw Thursday for a four-day visit ending Sunday.

His journey pays special homage to his Polish-born predecessor Pope John Paul II, viewed in his homeland as the greatest moral authority of modern time.

Pope Benedict plans to pay special heart-felt respect to him with a visit to the sleepy southern provincial town of Wadowice. Future pope Karol Wojtyla was born there in May 1920.

Pope Benedict has put the late pontiff on the fast-track to canonisation as a saint. He, however, is not expected to make any formal announcement regarding the matter in Poland this week.

The German-born pontiff will also focus on genocide and the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust during a Sunday visit to the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz. Opened by the Nazis in the occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim in 1940, the camp claimed the lives of up to 1.5 million people, mostly European Jews.

The largest of Nazi Germany's death camps, it was a key element in Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's plan of genocide against the 11 million Jews living in pre-war Europe and has come to be recognised as one of the world's most poignant symbols of man's grisly inhumanity to man.