No word on 'frozen' bodies

2005-08-15 15:24

Athens - Greek coroners on Monday were looking into asphyxiation as the probable cause of the death of 121 passengers on board a Cyprus Boeing 737 airliner before it crashed near Athens.

"Our main hypothesis is asphyxiation, but we cannot rule out anything," one of the coroners, Philippos Koutsaftis, told AFP.

Koutsaftis is part of the team at Goudi morgue in central Athens which was to begin autopsies later on Monday of the crash victims, once the bodies have been identified by close relatives.

The investigation into the crash, Greece's worst aviation diaster, is focusing on a problem with the air supply which may have led to the rapid death of the pilots of the Helios Airways twin-engine plane and probably most of the passengers.

"It seems that the deceased, in most cases, although not all, expired before the crash," said interior minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos, though he cautioned that it was "something we will have to confirm".

'Frozen' bodies

Though the recordings of the cockpit conversations have yet to be examined, the report of two Greek F-16 fighter pilots shadowing the Helios airliner points to a desperate effort to grab the plane's controls moments before the fall.

Asked about press reports that rescuers found that the bodies of the crash victims were frozen, Koutsaftis said that his medical team had not certified that.

"Even if the bodies were frozen, it is impossible to certify that immediately, the corpses having been exposed to sunlight and the flames" of the fire that broke out after the plane smashed into a wooded hillside outside Athens, where the Helios plane coming from Cyprus had a stopover before continuing to the Czech capital of Prague.

Rescuers so far have recovered 118 bodies of which about 30 were not recognisable and will have to be identified by DNA analysis, the Greek health ministry said.

- AFP