At least six of the 121 people killed on Sunday in Greece’s worst air disaster were alive when the jetliner plunged into a mountain outside Athens, autopsies revealed on Monday night.
After conducting the first toxicological tests, on six of the victims, Athens’ chief coroner, Philippos Koutsaftis, said he had found evidence that they had circulation in their heart and lungs. ”They had circulation and breath, so they were alive,” he told reporters outside the morgue where most of the bodies have been assembled. ”I cannot say they were conscious or unconscious.”
The Helios Airways Boeing 737 crashed into mountains near Athens, killing all 115 passengers and six crew on a flight from Larnaca to Prague with a stop in Athens.
A passenger list, released by the Transport Ministry in Cyprus, included a family of four Armenians living in Cyprus, 12 Greeks and more than 100 Cypriots. There were 17 children under 16 on board, the youngest aged four.
Rescuers had said many of the recovered bodies showed signs of being ”frozen solid”, prompting speculation that the passengers had died because of a dramatic drop in the cabin’s pressure.
However, on Monday night Greek police arrested a man who claimed to have received a telephone text message from one of the passengers before the crash saying: ”Farewell cousin. We are freezing in here.”
In a separate development on Monday, police in Cyprus raided the offices of Helios Airways, as grief and shock turned to anger against the airline which operated the Boeing 737.
The raid was carried out ”to secure … documents and other evidence which could be useful for the investigation into possible criminal acts”, Cyprus’s deputy presidential spokesperon, Marios Karoyian, said.
Elite police officers from Nicosia, the island’s capital, were dispatched to Helios’s headquarters in Larnaca after local authorities, including the chief of police, requested a search warrant.
A spokesperson for the airline said: ”We can confirm that we are cooperating with police in Cyprus in accordance with usual practice following this tragic event.
”Police officers did visit the offices of Helios today [Monday] in order to photocopy documents, which is part of their normal procedure.”
The Cypriot transport minister, Haris Thrasou, appeared on television to appeal to members of the public to contact authorities with any information they might have on Helios.
In the wake of Sunday’s crash, scores of former passengers have emerged to complain about mechanical failures on the airline’s jets.
Many have complained that they suffered extremes of temperature and other problems.
Shortly after taking off from Larnaca airport on Sunday, the plane’s German-born pilot reported problems with the air conditioning system l. Less than an hour later, as it entered Greek air space over the Aegean, the airliner lost all radio contact.
Although technical failure, which led to high-altitude decompression, is widely believed to be at fault for the crash, there were still more questions than answers as to why the 737, the workhorse of the Boeing group, went down.
On Monday, search teams found the second of the plane’s black box recorders and dispatched both of them to France for expert investigation. – Guardian Unlimited Â