ATHENS, Sept 12 (AFP) - Greek military and police forces continued searching Sunday for nine bodies still missing from a helicopter crash a day earlier that killed the number two figures of Greek Orthodoxy along with 16 others.
The Patriarch of Alexandria, Peter VII, was killed on Saturday along with his brother and members of his entourage when the helicopter transporting him from Athens to the Mount Athos monastery crashed in the Aegean Sea.
Eight bodies had been recovered by early Sunday, the military said. The cause of the crash is still unknown.
The Greek government confirmed the death of the 55-year-old patriarch, who was the second most senior figure in the Greek Orthodox Church and the spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox Christians in Africa.
A small armada of military and coastguard helicopters, planes, ships and patrol boats are carrying out the search, made difficult by the depth of the Aegean at the presumed crash site, some 5 nautical miles off the Halkidiki peninsula where Mount Athos is located.
"The search process is especially difficult," said a source from the merchant marine ministry. The helicopter wreck had still not been found by early Sunday, according to a spokesman from the army general staff.
A special oceanographic research vessel will arrive at the scene on Sunday to assist in the search, an army spokesman, Ioannis Lazos, told AFP.
The aircraft vanished from radar screens shortly after 11:00 am (0800 GMT) Saturday, when the pilot warned that he was losing altitude.
Government spokesman Theodore Roussopoulos said the helicopter had delayed its landing on Mount Athos because the patriarch had asked to first be flown over the site.
The patriarch had been on his way to make his first official visit to the semi-autonomous monastic republic of Mount Athos, a centre of Eastern Orthodoxy, since his appointment in 1997.
The Cyprus Orthodox Church called Saturday on its clergy to hold special memorial services across the island nation for the crash victims, several of whom, including the patriarch himself, were Cypriots.
Peter VII was greatly respected for his work on improving Orthodox relations with the Coptic and Roman Catholic Churches, as well as for his many humanitarian commitments in Africa.
A speaker of Arabic and English, he held a variety of positions in the Orthodox Church of Alexandria and across Africa before becoming patriarch.
Born in Cyprus on September 3, 1949, Peter entered a seminary at the age of 12 and, following theological studies in Greece, joined the Alexandrian church in Cairo in 1970.
In 1980, he took up office in Johannesburg, followed by Cameroon and West Africa in 1994.