FRENCH INVESTIGATORS have ended their search for bodies in the Alps where a Germanwings passenger jet crashed last month, killing all 150 people on board, a local official said yesterday.
According to black box data, the German co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately flew the Airbus A320 jet into a mountain during a flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.
“The search for bodies is over, but the search for the victims’ personal belongings is continuing,” a spokesman for the local government authority in the Alpes-deHaute-Provence region told Reuters.
The identification of victims will now continue through the analysis of 150 sets of DNA found at the site. The prosecutor leading the French legal probe has cautioned that the number of DNA sets does not necessarily mean all the victims have been found.
Loved ones of victims in the crash arrived at a memorial in the village of Le Vernet in the French Alps, where they met officials from the Lufthansa-owned lowcost carrier.
Cockpit audio recordings from the first black box led prosecutors to believe that Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and put the plane into a steep descent. This version of events appeared to be corroborated by data from the second black box recorder recovered earlier this week.
A separate German inquiry has pointed to mental health problems affecting Lubitz, 27. German prosecutors said that he had searched the internet for ways to commit suicide in the days before the crash, as well as about cockpit doors and safety precautions.
According to Der Spiegel magazine, the prosecutors searched the offices of five doctors whose help Lubitz had sought. Lufthansa has said Lubitz told its flight school in 2009 he had had a period of severe depression.
Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann, the US Republican representative, was criticised for comparing Barack Obama to Lubitz over the nuclear agreement with Iran. “With his Iran deal, Barack Obama is for the 300million souls of the United States what Andreas Lubitz was for the 150 souls on the Germanwings flight – a deranged pilot flying his entire nation into the rocks,” she said.