Germanwings Co-pilot deliberately crashed plane,says French Prosecutor.

 The chief Marseille prosecutor handling the investigation into the crash of a Germanwings jetliner said on Thursday that evidence from the cockpit voice recorder indicated that the co-pilot had deliberately locked the captain out of the cockpit and steered the plane into its fatal descent.

“At this moment, in light of investigation, the interpretation we can give at this time is that the co-pilot through voluntary abstention refused to open the door of the cockpit to the commander, and activated the button that commands the loss of altitude,” the prosecutor, Brice Robin, said.

He said it appeared that the intention of the co-pilot, identified as Andreas Lubitz, had been “to destroy the aircraft.” He said that the voice recorder showed that the co-pilot had been breathing until before the moment of impact, suggesting that he was conscious and deliberate in killing 144 passengers and five other crew members in the French Alps on Tuesday.
The inquiry had shown that the crash was intentional, Mr. Robin said, and he was considering changing his investigation from involuntary manslaughter to voluntary manslaughter.

He said there was no indication that this was a terrorist attack, and that Mr. Lubitz was not known to law enforcement officials. After the news conference, the German interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, told reporters in Berlin that security officials had checked their records after Tuesday’s crash and found no indication that anyone on board had links to terrorism.

An investigation into the background of Mr. Lubitz, who was 28 years old and came from the German town of Montabaur, is underway.

Asked if Mr. Lubitz had tried to commit suicide, he said, “I haven’t used the word suicide,” adding that it was “a legitimate question to ask.”
The revelation that one of the pilots of the jetliner was locked out of the cockpit before it crashed raised new and troubling questions on Thursday, as search teams continued to scour the rugged terrain of the French Alps for clues that could shed light on what happened. Several other issues remained unclear on Thursday, including the identity of the captain and why he had left the cockpit.

The flight, an Airbus A320 operated by the budget carrier Germanwings, was traveling to Düsseldorf, Germany, from Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday morning when it descended and slammed into the French Alps.

The prosecutor said that the authorities had a full transcript of the final 30 minutes of the voice recorder.

“During the first 20 minutes, the pilots talk normally,” he said, saying they spoke in a “cheerful” and “courteous” way. “There is nothing abnormal happening,” he said.

The prosecutor said the transcript showed that the captain was preparing a briefing for landing in Düsseldorf. The co-pilot’s answer, the prosecutor said, was “laconic.”

The commanding pilot then asked the co-pilot to take over, and the noise of a seat backing up and a door closing could be heard.

“At this stage, the co-pilot is in control, alone,” the prosecutor said. “It is when he is alone that the co-pilot manipulates the flight monitoring system to activate the descent of the plane.” The prosecutor said that this action could only have been “voluntary.
The captain is heard begging to get back in to the cockpit, but the co-pilot, heard breathing normally until the plane crashed, did not react, Mr. Robin said.

“You can hear the commanding pilot ask for access to the cockpit several times,” the prosecutor said. “He identifies himself, but the co-pilot does not provide any answer.”

“You can hear human breathing in the cockpit up until the moment of impact,” he said.

Before the plane crashed, he said, the sound of passengers screaming could be heard.

During the descent, he said, air traffic controllers repeatedly tried to contact the aircraft but received no response.

Martin Riecken, a spokesman in Frankfurt for Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings said before the news conference in Marseille that “both pilots had been trained to Lufthansa standards.”