LARNACA, Cyprus, 16 August 2005 — Police raided the offices of Cyprus’s Helios Airways yesterday as part of an investigation into the airline after one of its planes crashed in Greece killing all 121 people on board.
The raid came shortly after Attorney General Petros Clerides issued a warrant to search the offices and secure any documents or other material that could be useful in “an investigation into a possible criminal offense,” presidential spokesman Marios Karoyian said.
“Police went into the offices searching for documents,” a police source told AFP. Witnesses said they had also seen police going in to Helios’ headquarters in the southern coastal resort town of Larnaca.
A Communications Ministry official later told AFP the police action was being taken so no evidence could be destroyed.
“This is a joint effort to seal off the offices and collect evidence so it’s not destroyed,” the official said. “Allegations have been made in public and they must be checked, that’s all we can say right now.”
The raid came after police said they planned to interview relatives of the victims on the doomed Helios Airways flight which plunged into a hillside near Athens on Sunday, killing 115 passengers and six crew, most of them Cypriot.
The mother of Pambos Charalambous, the co-pilot on the ill-fated flight, told Antenna TV in an interview that her son had constantly complained about the aircraft having technical problems.
“He told me the plane had a problem and I urged him not to fly,” said Artemi Charalambous. “He told the company about it getting cold (on the plane) and they told him it would be fixed.” A German pilot and 10 Greeks were the only non-Cypriots who died in Sunday’s crash, with the somber roll call including a four-year-old girl and 14 other children aged 10 or less.
Helios Airways, which angered grieving relatives after a long delay in releasing a list of passengers on the flight, had earlier denied reports it had grounded its remaining fleet of three planes.
Executive Chairman Andreas Drakou also strongly rejected any suggestions that the low-cost airline, the republic’s only privately run carrier, had skimped on safety.
It was the most serious air disaster involving a Cypriot airline since independence in 1960. A total of 66 people died in 1967 when a London-Nicosia flight via Athens crashed into the Aegean Sea.
