CYPRUS: There were psychologists on the plane, at the airport and on the buses that took those who lost loved ones in Sunday's air crash outside Athens to the morgue. And when they got to a low-walled building in the midday heat yesterday, more counsellors trained in the art of handling death were there to meet them.
But no amount of specialist support was enough to assuage the anguish of the relatives.
No amount of expert advice, or soothing words, could help to explain why a sophisticated Cypriot airliner had turned into a flying tomb for all 121 people on board.
Women wailed as they stepped into the mortuary to identify the victims, punching their chests in disbelief. Their men stood in silence, numbed and hollow-eyed with the shock of it all.
"No! no! no!" one mother cried as relatives led her away. "Why? why? why?" she sobbed, shaking her head inconsolably. "Why were my babies taken from me like this? Tell me, why?"
For Anastasios Dounas, a father of three, it was no different. Like many of the relatives, he lost an entire family when Helios Airways flight ZU 522 plunged into the shrub-covered mountains of Attica: his doctor son Theodore, his Cypriot daughter-in-law Evangelia, and his three grandchildren, Vassiliki, Michalis and Tassos.
"I lost five members of my family like that," said the bespectacled factory worker, drawing on a cigarette in the shade of a pine tree. "That plane was a moving cemetery. We now know it had technical problems before it took off. We will sue Helios [the Cypriot operator that owned the aircraft]. We will go down there [to Cyprus] and sue them every which way. At least that will give us some moral satisfaction, if nothing else."
For Mr Dounas there was one other small comfort, enough to make him feel that perhaps his loved ones had died painlessly.
As evidence emerged that a technical fault was to blame for the accident, the relatives heard that it was likely that many of the passengers were dead before the Boeing-737 slammed into the mountain.
The discovery of bodies "frozen solid" by the dramatic drop in the cabin's temperature appeared to bear out that theory.
But later yesterday the investigation's chief coroner said at least six of the 121 people killed in the crash were alive when the plane smashed into the ground.
"Until now I have done an autopsy on six bodies and the first evidence is that when they were killed they had circulation in their heart and lungs," coroner Philippos Koutsaftis said.
Mr Dounas could not bring himself to confront the dead. Instead, he got another son, Kostas, to don a face mask and do the deed. But the mild-mannered mathematician had little luck. He recognised his two nephews, but not his brother or sister-in-law.
He was not alone. By late afternoon fewer than 10 of the 52 corpses brought to the mortuary had been identified. The rest, said relatives, were so disfigured that they were unrecognisable.
"They had nothing distinguishable on their face," said one young Cypriot woman emerging from the mortuary with her brother. "Nothing that you recognise on a face," she wept, and threw a surgical mask into a bin.
Dr George Christodoulou, head of the Hellenic Psychiatric Association, who was at the morgue, said: "It is a very tragic event, but what makes it even more difficult is the inability of relatives to identify victims. Many of the bodies were not only frozen; they were also very badly burned." By nightfall, three of the victims had still to be found.
But the search for their bodies will continue, Greek officials pledged, until they are also brought to the morgue.
With Greeks celebrating the August 15th feast day of the Virgin Mary, the tragedy has assumed national proportions, with the governments in both Athens and Nicosia declaring three days of mourning.
"I can't believe any of this has happened," said a woman who lost two of her children on the flight. "But a priest here told us that with August 14th being the eve of the Panayia's [Virgin's] feast day, it was a blessed day to die. They died as angels and went to heaven."