Some Were Alive When Jet Crashed

(CBS/AP)  At least half a dozen people aboard a Cypriot plane were alive when the jetliner carrying 121 people slammed into a hillside north of Athens, Athens' chief coroner said Monday after conducting the first autopsies from the crash.

But Fillipos Koutsaftis could not rule out that the six people were unconscious when the Helios Airways Boeing 737-300, with six crew and 115 passengers, plunged 34,000 feet Sunday into a mountainous area near the village of Grammatiko, 25 miles north of Athens. There were no survivors.

"We have performed autopsies on six people. Our conclusion is they had circulation and were breathing at the time of death," Koutsaftis said, but stressed: "I cannot rule out that they were unconscious."

He added that there were "80 passengers who cannot be recognized and that we are not examining at the moment. We are only talking about a certain number of people at this point. The tissue examinations on those who cannot be recognized will help us draw more clear conclusions."

Investigators, to be joined by U.S. experts, were sending the plane's data and cockpit voice recorders to France for expert examinations that could shed light on what happened.

But the head of the Greek airline safety committee, Akrivos Tsolakis, said the voice recorder was damaged. "It's in a bad state and, possibly, it won't give us the information we need," he said.

In Cyprus, police raided the offices of Helios Airways in the coastal city of Larnaca, near the international airport.

A search warrant was issued "to secure ... documents and other evidence which could be useful for the investigation into possible criminal acts," Cyprus' deputy presidential spokesman Marios Karoyian said.

CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips reports that records show oxygen masks were deployed during the flight, presumably due to a catastrophic loss of pressure and temperature during the plane's drop in altitude.

This is called high-altitude decompression, authorities say. And, as Phillips reports, a contaminated oxygen supply could have knocked out the crew, which would cause the plane to go on autopilot.

Reports from two fighter jets that were deployed when radio contact with the flight was lost en route to Athens from Cypress said the co-pilot appeared to be slumped on his seat.

Relatives of the dead, meanwhile, began to gather in Athens at a central morgue to identify their remains. Greek deputy Health Minister Giorgos Constantopoulos said there had been 21 children on board Helios Airways flight ZU522 from Cyprus to Athens, "all aged 4 and above." Greek and Cypriot officials had originally said there were 48 children on the plane.

No explanation for the discrepancy was given.

In a related development, police in northern Greece arrested a man who claimed to have received a telephone text message from a passenger. The man — identified as Nektarios-Sotirios Voutas, 32 — told Greek television stations that his cousin on board the plane sent him a cell-phone text message minutes before the crash saying: "Farewell, cousin, here we're frozen."

But authorities determined he was lying, and arrested him on charges of dissemination of false information.

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