16 fighter jets to scramble and fly alongside it, before it crashed in a mountainous region 40 kilometres north of Athens. The reported seeing the co-pilot slumped over the cockpit controls, apparently unconscious. There was no sign of the pilot, and oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling. Later in the flight, the fighter pilots reported seeing two unidentified people in the cockpit trying to take control of the plane. The bodies of co-pilot Pambos Haralambous and a flight attendant were found next to the cockpit wreckage, said Akrivos Tsolakis, head of the Greek airline safety committee. Coroners hope tests will show if toxic gases knocked the passengers and crew unconscious or whether they were knocked out by a sudden loss in pressure at 34,000 feet. "Until now, we cannot rule out any occurrence but it appears that many things went wrong at the same time," Boeing's Jim Prou said. In Cyprus, the co-pilot's mother told Antenna TV that her son had complained about the aircraft's technical problems. "He told me the plane had a problem, and I urged him not to fly," Artemi Haralambous said. In an effort to determine what caused the crash, Cypriot police raided the airline's offices in Cyprus Monday. Greek state television quoted the Cypriot transport minister as saying the plane had decompression problems in the past, but a Helios representative said there were no problems with the plane and it had been serviced just last week. --SP 1322 Local Time 1022 GMT
