ATHENS, Aug 15: All 121 people aboard a Cypriot airliner were killed on Sunday as it smashed into a wooded hillside near Athens after the pilot and co-pilot — who was seen “slumped over” in the cockpit — apparently lost control of the plane, officials said.
Greek and Cypriot officials said communications were suddenly lost with the Helios Airways twin-engine Boeing 737 and two Greek air force F16 fighters scrambled to investigate.
The flyers “saw two people in the cockpit, we don’t know if they were crew members or passengers, appearing to want to take over the controls,” said Greek government spokesman Theodore Roussopoulos.
They saw “the co-pilot slumped over and perhaps unconscious and the pilot not in his seat,” he said, adding that the oxygen masks were “activated” in the cabin.
The plane was about to land at Athens airport for a stopover on its journey from Lanarca in Cyprus to the Czech capital Prague when it crashed at Varnava, a largely uninhabited area 40 kilometres northeast of Athens, at 12:20 pm (0920 GMT).
“First indications from the Greek authorities are that this wasn’t a terrorist attack,” Cypriot presidential spokesman Marios Karoyan told journalists.
According to the Greek private TV station Alpha, a passenger sent a text message to a cousin saying: “We’re cold, the pilot is blue. We’re going to die. Farewell.”
At the crash site, Greek police said “there were no trace of survivors” among the 115 passengers and six crew whose bodies were burnt almost beyond recognition.
“I saw dozens of burned bodies scattered around the fuselage,” including “a woman still attached to her seat with her legs burnt,” said Andreas Lentzos, a photographer with the newspaper Ethnos.
Water-dropping aircraft and helicopters were called to extinguish a fierce blaze that hampered the rescue operation.
“The situation at the crash site is worse than we imagined,” said Georges Constantopoulos, the Greek health secretary.
Helios representative George Dimitriou said most of the passengers were of Cypriot nationality and included “48 youths on their way to Prague,” as well as some Greeks and a few other foreigners. One of the pilots was German, he said.—AFP