Update 5 - Germanwings Crash: 'Co-Pilot Deliberately Took Plane Down'

The house of Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz - who is believed to have deliberately flown flight 4U 9525 into the French Alps, killing all 150 people board - has been searched for possible evidence which could shed light on the cause of the disaster.



German police searched the house in the western city of Montabaur on Thursday after one of the air crash investigators on the case said the 28-year-old German had intentionally taken the Boeing A320 plane down two days earlier.



The mother of an ex-classmate of Lubitz told German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung the aviator had experienced psychological problems a few years ago.



"Apparently he had a burnout or depression," the woman said, claiming the illness occurred when the co-pilot was undergoing training at Lufthansa. 



Meanwhile, Germany's biggest airlines announced they would change their security regulations to ensure that two crew members would be in the cockpit at all times during a flight.



Executive Director of the German Aviation Association Matthias von Randow told German media that the union will decide on Friday to implement the "rule of two" without delay, meaning that when a pilot leaves the cockpit, another member of the cockpit crew has to replace him or her. 



'Audible breathing'



Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin, who is responsible for the investigation into the crash, said at a press conference at the Marignane airport near Marseille that the last 30 minutes of "black box" audio recordings showed  the co-pilot was in control of the flight when the crash occurred.



According to Robin, the first 20 minutes of conversation between the pilot and co-pilot was without incident, but then the main pilot left to use the washroom and the co-pilot took charge of the aircraft. 



The prosecutor said the co-pilot used the keys of the monitoring system to "voluntarily" put the aircraft into a dive, and his breathing was audible in the recording until the moment of impact. 



He said:  "The co-pilot intentionally kept the pilot outside the cockpit and took the Germanwings plane into a dive. The intention was to destroy this plane.



"He operated the button controlling the loss of altitude from 12,000 meters to 2000 meters."



He added that the co-pilot did not send any distress calls, despite repeated warnings and alarms on board the aircraft and by the air traffic controllers on the ground.



'Absolute silence'



The prosecutor said:  "We can hear him breathing in the cockpit until the last moment of the crash.



"There was an absolute silence inside the cockpit. Nothing, no word, during the last 10 minutes."



Asked if it was a case of suicide, the prosecutor said that was yet to be determined. 



He added that the death of the passengers was "sudden and immediate."



"We can hear cries only in the very last moments," he said.



'Motivation unknown'



Carsten Spohr, Chief Executive Officer of German airline Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, told journalists that German intelligence services did not believe the co-pilot had any terrorism-related motivation.



"As our interior minister said today at the press conference, there is no indication of terrorism … the ministry of interior, intelligence services, or we as the employer of the young man, we have no such indication," Spohr said at a press conference in the German city of Cologne.



He said that the co-pilot started his flight training with Lufthansa in 2008, but interrupted his training for some time.



Spohr declined to comment on the reasons for the interruption.



He confirmed that the co-pilot joined Germanwings in 2013, after successfully completing all the tests, including his psychological tests.



Asked about the possibility that the co-pilot committed suicide, Spohr declined to speculate, but said: "If a person takes another 149 people to death, that's another word, not suicide."



German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindte expressed shock over the first findings of the investigation. "We hope to find the second black box ... this can help us to get more information," Dobrindte said at a press conference in Berlin.



Ill-fated aircraft



German Foreign Ministry announced late Thursday that 75 Germans and 52 Spanish citizens were among the 150 passengers and crew who are believed to have perished in the tragedy.



The ministry said that the nationalities of 149 passengers had been identified so far, while the nationality of only one victim remained unverified.



Out of the 149 passengers, 75 victims were German citizens and among them four passengers had dual citizenship. Out of these four, three were citizens of Kazakhstan and one was a Japanese citizen.



Among the 52 Spanish citizens, four had dual citizenship. Out of these four, one victim was an Israeli, the other three were also citizens of Morocco, Mexico and United Kingdom.



Three U.S. citizens and three Argentinians were also on board the ill-fated aircraft.



The ministry added that two citizens each from the U.K., Australia, Colombia, Iran and Venezuela were also among the victims.



One Venezuelan victim also had a citizenship of Chile. Citizens from Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and Morocco were also on board.



German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed shock over the revelations and promised a comprehensive investigation.



"This is something that goes beyond any imagination. We still do not know the whole background of the incident, it remains very important to continue the investigations and seriously investigate each and every aspect," Merkel said.



She emphasized that German authorities would do everything to support the ongoing investigation. "We owe this to the people who lost their lives in this tragedy yesterday, and their relatives who are in deep pain at the moment," she said.



Recovery continues



Meanwhile, search-and-rescue teams are continuing their efforts to recover the victims' bodies, an effort expected to take until the end of next week, according to the prosecutor.



Families of the victims as well as of the crew arrived in Marseille Thursday and met the prosecutor. They are due to visit the crash site near Seyne-les-Alpes.



On Wednesday, recordings from the cockpit voice recorder of the crashed plane were successfully extracted from the first black box, including some "usable data," Remi Jouty, director of the Bureau of Accident Investigations, France's civil aviation regulator, said.



The investigation team includes French, German and Spanish investigators as well as the Interpol.



The Germanwings Airbus 320, was en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, when it went down Tuesday before 11 a.m. local time (10: 00 GMT) after an eight-minute descent, killing all 150 people on board. The majority of the victims were German and Spanish passengers.



The air disaster is one of the most tragic incidents in recent German aviation history, and the first deadly crash of a Germanwings plane since the low-budget airline was founded by Germany's largest airline in 2002.



A co-pilot and a passenger died when Lufthansa Airbus A320-200 overran a runway at an airport in Warsaw, Poland, in 1993. A total of 68 occupants survived.



The crash was also the first on French soil since July 25, 2000, when an Air France Concorde crashed into a hotel in Gonesse in the Val-d'Oise, shortly after taking off from Roissy-CDG airport, killing 13 German passengers and crew members, along with four others on the ground.



www.aa.com.tr/en - Ankara