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Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus
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Anonymous Coward
8/15/2005 2:48 PM
Report abusive post | Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus
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NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) - Police raided the offices of Helios Airways on Monday in the coastal city of Larnaca, near Cyprus international airport, a day after one of the company´s passenger jets crashed in Greece, killing all 121 people on board.
Police spokeswoman Christalla Dimitriou said officers "carried out a search" after asking the city´s court for a search warrant. There were no arrests and she did not say whether police had confiscated any material from the office.
AP-ES-08-15-05 1436EDT
[link to ap.tbo.com] |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
where are those damn debunkers huh! |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
 |
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Kreeper
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
De bunkers are under de ground. |
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Rev. Star Gazer
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
A search for what? |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
WOW! Not your ordinary plane accident for sure. |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
EXACTEMENT! |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Please keep this at the top |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
they have not found this pilot.
missing from cockpit. missing from crash. hmmmmmmm. |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Crash police raid airline offices
Monday, August 15, 2005; Posted: 2:55 p.m. EDT (18:55 GMT)
(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.
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.
Monday´s raid in in the coastal city of Larnaca was not violent and no arrests were made, Patricia Hadjisotirou added.
The flight recorders from the Cypriot airliner that crashed near Athens will be sent to France for examination to determine why it went down, possibly with all 121 people on board already dead.
All but two of the bodies have been recovered, a Greek government spokesman said Monday, and officials hope autopsies and cockpit recorders will hold clues to Sunday´s crash of Helios Airways Flight 522.
The autopsies were ordered to determine if the 115 passengers and six crew were dead or oxygen-starved before the crash, the spokesman said.
The captain´s body was one of those that had yet to be recovered, and Greek investigators -- working with an American team -- told The Associated Press they were trying to establish why he was not in his seat while the Boeing 737 was in peril.
A Greek Defense Ministry source with access to the investigation told Reuters that most of the bodies recovered were "frozen solid."
"Autopsy on passengers so far shows the bodies were frozen solid, including some whose skin was charred by flames from the crash," the source said.
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.
Deputy Interior Minster Marko Yannakis said 119 bodies had been recovered and two remained missing.
Forty-two of the passengers were children, a government spokesman said. However, other reports placed the number of children closer to 20.
Cypriot Transport Minister Haris Thrassou told Reuters that "between 15 and 20 young people below the age of 20" were on board.
And Greek deputy health minister Giorgos Constantopoulos said there were 21 children on board, "all aged 4 and above," The Associated Press reported.
Akrivos Tsolakis, head of the Greek airline safety committee, said the plane´s data and voice recorders were being sent to French air safety investigators for further examination, but that the voice recorder was badly damaged.
"It´s in a bad state and, possibly, it won´t give us the information we need," The Associated Press quoted him as saying. "Both boxes will be sent to Paris where a French committee will help us and the foreign experts that are here to decode (it)."
Tsolakis called the crash the "worst accident we´ve ever had" but said he was confident his panel would be able to reach a conclusion "in a few days, a very few days."
The Boeing 737, en route from Larnaca, Cyprus to Athens, crashed north of the Greek capital shortly after 12 p.m. (5 a.m. ET). The plane had been scheduled to continue from Athens to Prague, Czech Republic.
A Cyprus government spokesman said all the passengers were Cypriots.
Two Greek F-16s were sent to intercept the plane after it entered Greek airspace and failed to respond to communication attempts.
The fighter pilots reported seeing two people who they thought were crew members trying to bring the plane under control to keep it from crashing, a government spokesman said.
The body of a woman flight attendant was found in the wreckage of the cockpit, a spokesman said.
When the F-16s met the plane at 10,400 meters (34,000 feet), its pilots reported seeing one of the doomed jet´s pilots slumped over its controls, but they did not see the other pilot.
They also said they could see through the cabin windows that oxygen masks had dropped from the ceiling of the plane, and witnesses at the crash site reported that oxygen masks were still attached to some of the passengers´ faces.
Thrassou said the passengers and crew may have been dead when the plane went down.
"Unfortunately, it appeared that the pilot was already dead as was, possibly, everyone else on the plane," AP quoted him as saying.
The pilots of the Helios jet had reported an air conditioning problem after takeoff, and a passenger sent a text message to his cousin saying it was freezing in the plane.
"The pilot has turned blue," the passenger said in the SMS message, Reuters quoted a Greek government spokesman as saying. "Cousin farewell we´re freezing."
On Cyprus, several callers to radio and TV programs said they experienced severe air-conditioning problems on Helios jets in recent months, AP reported.
Some callers said the cabin was freezing and the crew provided blankets, while others said it became unbearably hot.
Refusing to fly
Greek state television quoted the Cyprus transport minister as saying the plane had decompression problems in the past. But a Helios representative said the plane had "no problems and was serviced just last week," according to AP.
A Cyprus Transport Ministry spokesman told Reuters that crew and passengers had refused to board a Helios Boeing 737 scheduled to fly from Larnaca to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.
Meanwhile, flights brought families from Cyprus to help in the identification process, officials said.
A makeshift morgue was set up and a cargo plane put on standby to transport the bodies back to Cyprus.
Greek officials said they suspect malfunctions in the oxygen supply or pressurization system could have caused the crash. (Full story)
Greek and Cypriot officials said terrorism did not appear to be the cause.
"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.
Greek ministers broke off their holidays Sunday to return to Athens for emergency meetings. Aviation experts from Boeing are expected to join the investigation in the coming days, according to the U.S. Embassy.
"Although there are precedents for both pilots losing consciousness at the controls of aircraft in the past, for it to happen on a large airliner like a Boeing 737, with all the backup systems they have there, does seem to be really quite extraordinary," said Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence.
A lack of oxygen apparently caused the crash that killed golfer Payne Stewart in the U.S. state of South Dakota in 1999.
Stewart´s twin-engine jet went down in a pasture after flying halfway across the country on autopilot, as Stewart and the four others aboard apparently lay unconscious for lack of oxygen after the plane lost cabin pressure. Everyone was killed.
Helios Airlines is a subsidiary of Libra Holidays Group, which specializes in travel packages to Greece and Cyprus.
The weekend marked the Greek Orthodox holiday of the Assumption of the Virgin, a peak travel time. |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
I wonder if it was kept sensitive, due to the Gaza pullout. its all a bit hush hush |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
very mysterious, I´d say |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
 |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
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Rev. Star Gazer
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
If the text message was a fraud, how did the hoaxer know that they were all frozen BEFORE the official reports of that came out?! |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Exactly my dear....
there is more than meets the eye for sure :-) |
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Universal AC
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
The captain didn´t go down with his ship? |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Why have the text fraud other than to establish a link to the story that you wish to be concocted later?
The message hoaxers want you to think that this is a decompression issue only? |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
I was attacked on here for two hours about this flight and peronally verbally abused over my apparent woo wooisms. I hope those people are as i said prepared to eat theyre words |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
If the message is a hoax (seems likely now) then we definitely have major foul play. The message mentions nothing of highjacking or suspicious activity, therefore trying to put this off as a decompression incident. If the airlines are involved with covering up maintenance issues, they would not want to highlight it with a hoax about it. |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
With all of the wierd goings-on now days, it is never wise to attack a woo-woo unless he/she is obviously delusional. |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Yeah, how the fuck did a TEXT message get on all the newsreels so quickly? I definately thought that was fishy. |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
If the pilot is not found, is it possible that he could have leapt from the plane and at the same time ensured its demise? |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Things that don´t add up
Bodies frozen solid, but crew/passengers in the cockpit trying to regain control of the plane.
Captain not in his seat. Captains body not found (yet)
Windows should be fogged or ice covered if there was a hole and the temp did drop. That is what was reported from the Payne Stewart disaster. Yet the F16´s say that they could see thru the windows and see the oxygen masks had deployed.
One black box fine, the "voice" recorder not.
Two instances were "voice" recognition appears to unavailable. Black box and phone message
The person in Greece who reported the text message from his cousin was arrested because his "cousin" was not on the plane. So they say he is "lying".
Would there not be a record if a text message was sent to his phone, and would there not be a record of the phone that called him.
They have not said whether or not the message was really sent. If so what phone sent it.
Cell phones in Europe etc are much more advanced than our system in their abilities. Almost everyone uses cell. Hard lines are way to expensive in most countries, and the service is horrible. So the records should be there and be very exact.
At what altitude did all this take place. F16´s etc. That info has never appeared.
At what time did the Greek say he received the text message.
I would say they raided the office looking for records on the pilot, for starters. |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Phone call messages were extremely quick to be reported from the 9-11 incidents also -- too quick. |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Also they say the plane was circling the city on the island for near on 25 minutes |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Were the alive pilots (seen in the cockpit by F-16´s) trying to spot their target, but then were shot down before they could get there? |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
Will "autopilot" have a plane circle the city? |
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Rev. Star Gazer
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
This story has more ´holes´ and questions than the Utah truck explosion! |
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Anonymous Coward
12/8/2005 10:08 AM | | Re: Police Raid Helios Airways Offices in Cyprus | Quote |
The person in Greece who reported the text message from his cousin was arrested because his "cousin" was not on the plane. So they say he is "lying".
huh? I guess I missed this..
I had heard that the recipient of the text message "TOOK IT TO A TV STATION"... |
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