Crash police raid airline offices
ATHENS, Greece (CNN) -- Police in Cyprus have raided the offices of Helios Airways, officials said, a day after one of the company's jets crashed in Greece, killing all 121 people on board.
Six people who died in the crash were alive when the plane crashed, chief Athens coroner Fillipos Koutsaftis said Monday. It remained unclear whether they were conscious, he said.
"We have performed autopsies on six people. Our conclusion is they had circulation and were breathing at the time of death," Koutsaftis said.
As investigators tried to establish the cause of the crash, a Greek Cypriot government spokeswoman told CNN Monday that prosecutors felt insufficient information had been surrendered by the airline and ordered police to take further documents.
Among the things police were searching for were maintenance records about the plane involved in the crash.
Some news reports have said the plane was serviced for air conditioning trouble in the past.
Yiannis Papageorgiou, a spokesman for the Greek Air Force, said authorities were investigating whether that could have been related to the crash.
The two Helios pilots had reported an air conditioning problem shortly after leaving Larnaca, according to the Czech Press Agency.
Investigators at the crash site in Grammatiko pieced through the charred wreckage Monday, but reported no clues as to what had gone wrong.
"The plane observed all the necessary maintenance and checks in line with international requirements, those of the construction firm, and Cypriot civil aviation requirements," said Andreas Drakos, president of the Cypriot airline Helios Airways, in a news conference before the airline's offices were raided.
"Before the plane left, it had completely undergone all checks according to the regulations."
Helios had no immediate response to the raid.
A team of Americans from Boeing -- the company that made the 737 aircraft -- headed to the region as well to take part in the investigation.
Though the flight data and voice recorders could provide some clues, investigators said the voice recorder was badly damaged. It remained unclear how much sound would be audible. Both so-called "black boxes" -- in this case, actually orange boxes -- were taken away by investigators.
A central question is whether the passengers and crew were alive, or perhaps unconscious, before the plane slammed into a mountain.
When Helios Flight 522 from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Prague, Czech Republic, with a scheduled stop in Athens, first crossed into Greek airspace and failed to respond to communications attempts, two Greek fighter jets were sent to intercept it.
The plane was on autopilot at 35,000 feet. The pilots of the F-16s reported seeing one of the pilots slumped over its controls, but did not see the other pilot. They saw two people who they thought were crew members trying to prevent the plane from crashing, a government spokesman said.
The body of a female flight attendant was found in the wreckage of the cockpit, the spokesman said.
The fighter pilots also said they could see through the cabin windows that the oxygen masks had dropped from the ceiling of the plane, and witnesses at the crash site reported that some passengers' faces still had oxygen masks attached.
The plane was about 25 miles east of Athens when it crashed shortly after 12 p.m. (5 a.m. ET) Sunday on the island of Euboea, sparking forest fires that hindered initial recovery efforts.
Investigators are looking into whether the plane had experienced a catastrophic loss of air pressure.
"The first indications in Cyprus and in Greece are that this was not caused by a terrorist act," said Marios Karoyian, a presidential spokesman in Cyprus.
A Cyprus government spokesman said all 121 people aboard, including six crew members, were Cypriots.
Deputy Interior Minster Marko Yannakis said Monday 119 bodies were recovered, and searchers were looking for remains of two others.
Flights arrived in Greece Monday carrying family members from Cyprus. They were asked to help identify bodies at a makeshift morgue.
"I want those responsible to be punished," said Anastasios Doulas, who lost her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Speaking angrily through tears, she said, "Those responsible have created a flying death-trap. Didn't they see the problem? I want them to be severely punished."
Cyprus declared three days of mourning for the victims. In Athens, Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis took part in a ceremony honoring the dead.
The crash took place during Greek Orthodox holiday of the Assumption of the Virgin, a peak travel time. Helios is a subsidiary of Libra Holidays Group, which specializes in travel packages to Greece and Cyprus.
Meanwhile Monday, police in northern Greece said they had arrested a man who said he had received a telephone text message from a passenger on board the doomed plane, according to AP.
Police said the man was Nektarios-Sotirios Voutas, 32, who had told Greek TV stations Sunday his cousin texted him minutes before the crash saying: "Farewell, cousin, here we're frozen."
Authorities said they believed the man was lying, and his cousin's name was not on the Cypriot government's official list of victims.
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How could six people be alive and the rest frozen?