A grief-stricken Cyprus started yesterday to bury the first of its air crash victims after a Cypriot plane plunged into a hillside outside Athens killing all 121 on board.
The majority of those on Sunday's doomed Helios Airways flight UZ 522 were Cypriots, making it the worst air disaster to befall the island.
The local press has been full of tragic stories about whole families wiped out and young children left orphaned.
The first funeral service, in the capital Nicosia, was for the co-pilot Pambos Charalambous, 40, who leaves behind a wife and four children. Mystery still surrounds the circumstances of the crash.
Charalambous had worked in Britain for 12 years and only returned to the island to be near his mother.
His family are bitter and say Charalambous had constantly complained about the technical problems he faced on the crashed aircraft.
"My father kept a diary about the problems of the airline and if that gets out the company will close," his son Yiannis Charalambous told local Mega TV. "We don't want revenge, we want the truth to come out."
The crew of two Greek fighter jets reported seeing the Boeing 737 co-pilot slumped over, perhaps unconscious, and pilot Marten Hans Jergen not in his seat, while the cockpit's oxygen masks were activated.
The co-pilot was among 23 bodies flown back to Cyprus late Tuesday from Greece after being identified by their relatives. The German pilot's body has yet to be found.
Another funeral was to be held later Wednesday for a couple who were killed on the flight.
Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos was to fly to Greece to visit the crash site and be briefed first-hand by Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis on the investigation.
A one-minute silence was to be observed during Wednesday's World Cup qualifier in the Faroe Islands where the Cyprus national team was to wear black arm bands as a mark of respect for the dead.
The government declared three days of official mourning but in some of the worst-hit towns and villages on the resort island of less than a million people some muncipalities declared longer periods.
The southeastern town of Paralimni, which lost 16 dead, five of them from a single family, announced 40 days of mourning.
One Paralimni family left behind a two-year-old child, Vassilis. His sister Chryso, five, father Odysseas Koutsofta, 28, and mother Xenia, 27, were all killed in the crash.
Helios executive chairman Andreas Drakou has strongly rejected any suggestions the private low-cost airline had skimped on safety.
But the company acknowledged that the crashed aircraft had been involved in a previous decompression incident on a Warsaw flight in December last year.
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