Disbelief and rage in German town over news plane crash may have been deliberate

Officials in Haltern am See on Thursday expressed their shock over news that the crash that killed 16 students and two teachers from the town could have been deliberate.

 

A young German co-pilot locked himself in the cockpit of Germanwings flight 9525 and flew it into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board including himself, prosecutors said on Thursday.

 

After listening to "black box" voice recordings, French prosecutors left no doubt that they believe 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz was in control of the Airbus A320 and set it on its fatal descent. They offered no explanation for his motive.

 

"After [German] Transport Minister Dobrindt just confirmed the latest information in his statement, I wonder whether this nightmare we are in here in Haltern am See will ever stop. It is hard enough for the relatives to get back to real life after the death of a loved one, but after it has become clear that an individual consciously caused this tragedy, this has reached an even worse dimension," the small town's mayor, Bodo Klimpel, said.

 

The headmaster of Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium attended by the local victims said that it was "much, much worse" than the cause of the crash being a technical fault.

 

"It is not worse as far as the number of dead is concerned. But if the cause of the plane crash had been a technical fault than we would have know the reason and could have rectified the situation, so something like can never happen again. But what makes us so furious - and I repeat the words of our mayor - is that one suicide would cause the deaths of 149 other people," Ulrich Wessel said.

 

Psychologists warned that the grief for the relatives will be much greater now.

 

"I think that nobody could imagine such a dramatic change of events. And it is not foreseeable what that means in the long-run. Definitively a higher burden to carry, powerlessness and rage," one of the school's psychological team, Michael Behren, said.

 

Investigators were still searching for the second of the two black boxes on Thursday in the ravine where the plane crashed, 100 km (65 miles) from Nice, which would contain data from the plane's instruments.

 

75 Germans were killed according to a German foreign ministry spokesman in the first major air passenger disaster on French soil since the 2000 Concorde accident just outside Paris. Madrid revised down on Thursday the number of Spanish victims to 50 from 51 previously.

 

As well as Germans and Spaniards, victims included three Americans, a Moroccan and citizens of Britain, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Iran and the Netherlands, officials said. However, DNA checks to identify them could take weeks, the French government said.

 

The families of victims were being flown to Marseille on Thursday before being taken up to the zone close to the crash site. Chapels had been prepared for them with a view of the mountain where their loved ones died.  — Reuters