Volunteers who joined the search for Natalie Christopher, the British astrophysicist whose body was found in a ravine on the Greek island of Ikaria, have described how relief quickly turned to disappointment when they realised she was dead.
“We had so wanted to find her alive,” said Michalis Christodoulou who leads the island’s rescue unit. “And she was clearly dead… there was nothing we could do.”
Christodoulou also said search parties had unwittingly passed close to the site where Cristopher’s body was eventually discovered barely a mile away from the studio apartment where she had been staying.
“We had passed the spot at least twice but the gorge was very deep and very difficult to access. We never expected she could possibly be down there,” he said.
The disappearance of the 35-year old scientist sparked an unprecedented hunt after her partner reported her missing on Monday when she failed to return from a morning run.
The search expanded to land, sea and air as the quest to find Christopher intensified. A helicopter equipped with infrared cameras was dispatched to the Aegean island from Athens, along with drones, sniffer dogs and specialised phone-tracking teams.
Christopher’s body was partially obscured by a tree, but searchers eventually spotted her brightly coloured trainers. “It was difficult to make her out,” said Costas Markakis, who heads Ikaria’s volunteer firefighters. “It was her trainers, they were blue and pink. We recognised them first.”
Police have speculated that Christopher, an extreme sports enthusiast, could have fallen after attempting to scale the cliff face. Greece’s leading state pathologist, Nikos Karakoukis, said on Thursday he believed the Anglo-Cypriot academic had been killed in an accident.
After conducting a three-hour examination at the scene he said there was enough evidence to conclude that “death came from a fall from a height,” singling out the head injury she had suffered.
The coroner, however, said that the cause of death would only be determined once an autopsy and toxicological tests had been conducted. Until that time, police will not rule out the possibility that Christopher was pushed into the ravine and will continue to consider the case a criminal investigation.
Christopher’s body has been transported to Athens to be examined by forensic scientists. Tributes continued to be made on Friday to a woman who was also a prominent force in the grassroots movement to reunite the island of Cyprus where she lived and worked.
Friends, fellow campaigners and even the island’s president spoke glowingly of Christopher, who strove, mostly through sport, to accomplish her dream of bringing Greek and Turkish Cypriots together “under the same sky”.
Remembering their fellow member this week, the Cyprus Trail Runners wrote: “We hope Natalie is now running among the stars and planets she loved so much - whooping through the milky way and leaping over moonbeams.”
