CRIMINAL proceedings here in Cyprus into the Helios air disaster may run in tandem with those in Greece, Attorney-general Petros Klerides said yesterday.
The top law official yesterday convened a news conference – an uncommon event – to explain how the prosecution leg of the investigation would work in both countries.
On Tuesday an Athens public prosecutor launched criminal proceedings into the aviation accident.
These concern “voluntary manslaughter with probable malice against any and all involved parties,” – a convoluted legalistic term designating gross negligence leading to death.
The move paves the way for Greek police investigators to begin interviewing people both here and in Greece.
However, police on the island have already commenced their own investigations, questioning anyone involved in some way or another with the accident – including officials from the embattled airline and Civil Aviation.
But despite the ominous wording of the Greek process, Klerides said yesterday that it did not presuppose any guilty parties.
“It does not mean that authorities there have suspects. No court case has been filed.
Quite simply, Greek police will start gathering evidence, just like we are doing.”
Cypriot police officers have been travelling to neighbouring Greece to take affidavits, said Klerides.
Detectives in both countries would assist one another in this task, but once – and if – the next stage, actual prosecution, were reached then judicial authorities would go their own way.
According to the Attorney-general, in the event a person or legal entity were found guilty in one country, then proceedings against them would cease in the other.
But asked what would happen if someone were cleared in one of the courts, Klerides was hesitant, noting “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Unlike Cyprus the Greek legal system can try and sentence a person in absentia – for instance if one of the Cypriot witnesses refused to show up there.
And Klerides said it was entirely possible in Greece to subpoena Akrivos Tsolakis, the chairman of the committee that produced a report into the causes of the crash.
The whole arrangement has raised the question of whether this will turn into a race between the two countries.
Cyprus has a head start on Greece of a few months.
Yesterday Klerides would not comment on how far the Cypriot investigation had come or offer an estimate as to when it would wrap up.
“It’s hard to say. You interview one person, and then discover you need to talk to three more,” he said.
The police inquiry in Cyprus has already been mired in controversy, for two reasons. First, it was suspended for several months pending the publication of the Tsolakis report. Second, immediately after the Tsolakis report came out, Klerides took flak for saying that prosecuting anyone would be “very difficult – a belief he reiterated yesterday.
Without naming names, the accident report cited pilot error as the primary cause, but went on to say that operational deficiencies at Helios (now known as ajet) were a latent, or underlying, reason for the disaster.
When Klerides made the contentious remark, he was probably hinting at the fact the two aviators were now deceased, and also that it would be tough to establish a criminal link between an airline suspected of cutting corners and the actual accident.
But there is more. According to the latest interpretation, the Attorney-general will use the Tsolakis report together with the findings of an independent commission of inquiry to decide whether to prosecute.
The broad mandate of the commission, headed by ex Supreme Court judge Panayiotis Kallis, is to “recommend” who is responsible for the accident. The twist is that the commission’s findings are not legally binding on authorities.
Even more confusingly, this week Kallis said his commission would base its conclusions exclusively on the Tsolakis report – which begs the question of why the commission should function at all.
Moreover, Kallis’ assertion does not appear to be consistent with the chain of events: if the commission was to be based solely on the report, then why did it start convening before the report was out?
There is a growing suspicion the commission was cynically set up to give the victims’ relatives a channel to vent their anger.
Also, some ask what would happen if Tsolakis’ findings were at odds with the police investigation.
A tentative example: in a leaked police report appearing in Simerini on August 20, 2005, Alan Irwin, the airline’s chief engineer at the time, said that he asked the captain of the doomed flight:
“Did you reconfigure the pressurisation settings manually?”
But in the Tsolakis report, Irwin is said to have asked the captain:
“Did you change the pressurisation system to auto?”
The two statements are contradictory. In order to reconfigure the pressure settings manually, this entails that the plane took off in automatic mode. But if during the flight the engineer was asking the pilot whether he switched to auto, that means takeoff must have been done on manual.
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