Co-pilot alive when plane crashed

The co-pilot and two stewardesses on a Cyprus airliner were alive when the plane crashed in Greece at the weekend killing all 121 aboard, the chief coroner of the investigation said yesterday.

Giving the results of the autopsies on 26 victims of the mystery crash, Philippos Koutsaftis told reporters: "All the individuals, including the co-pilot and two stewardesses, died from multiple injuries to the body. They were alive when they died (in the crash)."

The Helios Airways Boeing 737 crashed into mountains near Athens on Sunday, killing all 115 passengers and six crew on a flight from Larnaca to Prague with a stop in Athens.

Autopsy results issued on Monday on six of the 26 victims so far examined also said they were alive but the latest results were the first finding that crew members were also alive, if possibly unconscious, when the plane plunged to earth.

"The immediate cause of death of these (earlier six) people was through injuries, from their wounds. They were alive as the plane was falling," another coroner, Nikos Karagoukis, one of a six-strong team carrying out the autopsies, had told reporters earlier.

In Cyprus, Kyriacos Pougrouris, a cousin of co-pilot Pambos Charalambous, said his relative had been called in at two hours' notice to help fly the plane when the scheduled co-pilot was unavailable. Pougrouris said his cousin had complained before the flight of "problems" with the aircraft.

"Pambos told his mother twice in the last week that there was a problem with the plane, not the same kind of problem as you have with a car that you can pinpoint easily," Mr Pougrouris said in an interview with Cyprus State Radio yesterday.

"He didn't go into it, but he also told me personally."

In London, Helios Airways said in a statement the plane had suffered a loss of cabin pressure once before.

Police in Cyprus ended a search of offices of Helios Airways for evidence in case of a criminal investigation into the disaster. Initial investigations had suggested that when the plane crashed all on board were dead or unconscious because of a loss of oxygen and cabin pressure in freezing temperatures at 35,000 feet - nearly 10 kilometres up.

Greece's Eleftherotypia newspaper, quoting senior government sources, reported that if the plane had continued flying for just five more minutes, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis would have had to give an order to shoot it down.

The doomed flight was declared "renegade" when it entered Greek airspace and failed to make radio contact. Two F-16 fighter jets were scrambled to investigate before the plane crashed 40 kilometres north of Athens.

The F-16s reported the co-pilot was slumped in the cockpit, the pilot was not visible and oxygen masks were seen dangling. Rescue officials said yesterday they were no longer sure that one of the bodies recovered earlier was that of the German pilot and that he could be among three bodies still missing.

The Ethnos newspaper reported yesterday that the F-16 pilots had captured video footage of a female flight attendant, one of six crew, trying to take control of the plane.

A passenger list showed the German chief pilot, a family of four Armenians living in Cyprus, 12 Greeks and 104 Cypriots were killed in the crash. There were 17 children under the age of 16.

Greek officials said only 45 of the victims could be identified by visual means. The rest would have to be identified by DNA testing, which could take up to 10 days.

The exact cause of the crash and why the pilots were unable to carry out well-rehearsed safety procedures was unclear.

The two black boxes have been recovered, but a Greek official said the cockpit voice recorder was badly damaged.

Robert Benzon, who headed a probe by the US National Transportation Safety Board into the death of golfer Payne Stewart in 1999, has joined the Cyprus investigation.