“The co-pilot was alone at the controls,” he said. “(He) deliberately refused to open the door of the cockpit to the pilot.”
The pilot, believed to have gone to the toilet, made increasingly furious attempts to re-enter the cockpit, banging on the door, the recordings appear to show.
– ‘Worst nightmares’ –
In the northwestern German town of Haltern, which lost 16 students and two teachers killed while returning from a school exchange, the revelations caused shock and anger.
“Personally, I’m stunned, angry, speechless and deeply shocked,” Haltern’s mayor Bodo Klimpel told a news conference.
“I’m asking myself when this nightmare will end. It’s bad enough for the families to learn of the death of loved ones in an accident. But when it’s clear that an individual may possibly have deliberately caused the accident, it takes on an even worse dimension,” Klimpel said.
The shaken principal of the stricken school, Ulrich Wessel, said “what makes all of us so angry (is) that a suicide can lead to the deaths of 149 other people … It leaves us angry, perplexed, stunned.”
The head of Germanwings’ parent company Lufthansa, Carsten Spohr, said that “in our worst nightmares we could not have imagined that this kind of tragedy could happen to us”.
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