The co-pilot in the doomed Germanwings plane deliberately locked his colleague out of the cockpit and crashed the plane into a mountain, it has emerged.
According to Sky News, Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin has confirmed that the co-pilot hit the descent button and “wanted to destroy the plane”, leading to a collision that claimed the lives of 150 people.
“We assume the (captain) went to the loo or something. The co-pilot is on his own in charge of the plane, and it is while he is alone that he uses the flight monitoring system which starts the descent of the plane,” he said.
He continued to say that there is no indication of panic by the co-pilot “because his breathing was normal” and recording recovered from the crash site suggest that he was conscious when the crash occurred.
“This has only been a few hours that we’ve known about this (the co-pilot’s actions). We should shortly get from the Germans… I hope that tomorrow I will have some answers and some background.”
The horrifying crash took place yesterday morning when the plane was en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, with two babies and a group of sixteen German school children understood to have been on board.
It was also revealed today that screams were only heard from the passengers “at the very end”, with Robin adding “Death was instant. It hit the mountain at 700km an hour”.
Robin has named the pilot as 28-year-old German national Andreas Lubitz, who had “only been working a few months and had only a few hundred hours on this plane”, adding that the tragedy is not being treated as a terrorist incident at present.
