A plane operated by the budget carrier of Germany's Lufthansa crashed in a remote area of the French Alps on March 24, killing all 150 on board in France's worst aviation disaster in decades
Andreas Lubitz, Co-pilot of crashed Germanwings flight 9525 'wanted to destroy plane in suicide and mass murder mission'.
The co-pilot was named as 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz, who had joined Germanwings last year.
Brice Robin, the Marseille public prosecutor, told a press conference that the first officer had locked the captain out of the cockpit and set the controls of the Airbus A320 for a rapid descent and the eventual crash into the French Alps.
Immediately beforehand, conversation between the two pilots was normal, said M Robin. He revealed chilling evidence from the cockpit voice recorder about what the co-pilot did next: “He voluntarily allowed the aircraft to lose altitude. He had no reason to do this. He had no reason to stop the captain coming back into the cockpit.”
The prosecutor said the co-pilot was breathing normally throughout the eight-minute descent. But he neither spoke nor responded in any way to alarms within the aircraft and from the ground. He outlined the sequence of events from the moment the captain asked the co-pilot to take over while he went to the toilet.
"The co-pilot at that moment alone uses the flight management system that starts the descent of the aircraft. This action can only be done voluntarily.” He ruled out the possibilities that anyone else was in the cockpit, and that the co-pilot had collapsed and inadvertently triggered a descent.
“We hear several cries of the pilot asking for access through the intercom system. But there’s no answer from the co-pilot.”
“The tower asks them to do a distress signal but still there is no response. The control tower then asks other aeroplanes to try to contact this Airbus. No answer is forthcoming. There are alarm systems that indicate proximity to the ground.”
We hear noises of someone trying to break into the cockpit. Just before the final impact we hear the sound of a first impact.”
M Robin ruled out terrorism as a possible motive, saying “At this stage nothing indicates a terrorist attack.”
He said that the victims would have been aware of their fate “Only in the last moments” before the crash. “We only hear screams in the very end, in the last moments of the flight. Death was instant. It hit the mountain at 700km/h.”
Milad Hojjatoleslami and Hossein Javadi (top left) lost their lives in the crash, but Payam Younesipour and Saeed Zahedian (bottom right) were fortunate enough to have changed their travel plans.
2 iranian sport journalist Milad Hojjatoleslami and Hossein Javadi lost their lives in the crash, but Payam Younesipour and Saeed Zahedian were fortunate enough to have changed their travel plans.
All four men were sports journalists from Iran. They had just arrived in Europe for the first time to cover a number of sporting events, including Sunday’s clásico between Real Madrid and Barcelona.
A last-minute change of plan, however, meant that only two of them, Milad Hojjatoleslami and Hossein Javadi, were on board the Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday.
Iran’s foreign ministry confirmed on Wednesday that Hojjatoleslami and Javadi were on board the Airbus A320 that crashed en route from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. The country’s president, Hassan Rouhani, offered his condolences.