DUSSELDORF, GERMANY // The co-pilot thought to have deliberately crashed his Germanwings jet into the French Alps, killing all 150 aboard, kept secret the fact that he was written off ill on the day, German prosecutors said on Friday.
Searches of his homes had netted “medical documents that suggest an existing illness and appropriate medical treatment”, including “torn-up and current sick leave notes, among them one covering the day of the crash,” they said.
This “backs up the suspicion” that Andreas Lubitz — who reportedly suffered from severe depression -- “hid his illness from his employer and his colleagues”, said prosecutors in the western city of Duesseldorf in a statement.
They said that “interviews on this subject and the evaluation of medical records will take several more days”, and that the outcome would be made public “once reliable evidence is available”.
Authorities did not find a “suicide note or a confession”, or any evidence that the co-pilot’s actions may have been motivated by “a political or religious background”.
Officers had on Thursday combed through a flat Lubitz kept in Duesseldorf as well as the house where he lived with his parents in the small western town of Montabaur.
The black box voice recorder indicates that Lubitz, 27, locked his captain out of the cockpit on Tuesday and deliberately sent Flight 4U 9525 crashing into a mountainside, in what appears to have been a case of suicide and mass murder.
French prime minister Manuel Valls said that “everything is pointing towards an act that we can’t describe: criminal, crazy, suicidal.”
But Bild daily earlier reported that Lubitz sought psychiatric help for "a bout of serious depression" in 2009 and was still getting assistance from doctors.
The paper also cited security sources as saying that Lubitz and his girlfriend were having a “serious crisis in their relationship” that left him distraught.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said that Lubitz had suspended his pilot training, which began in 2008, “for a certain period”, before restarting and qualifying for the Airbus A320 in 2013.
According to Bild, those setbacks were linked to "depression and anxiety attacks".
Lubitz lived with his parents in his small hometown of Montabaur in the Rhineland and kept an apartment in Duesseldorf, the city where his doomed plane was bound on Tuesday.
Lubitz locked himself into the cockpit when the captain went out to use the toilet, then refused his colleague’s increasingly desperate attempts to get him to reopen the door, French prosecutor Brice Robin said.
According to Bild, the captain even tried using an axe to break through the armoured door as the plane was sent into its fatal descent by Lubitz.
The tragedy has already prompted a shake-up of safety rules, with several airlines, including German companies, announcing a new policy requiring there always be two people in the cockpit.
* Agence France-Presse
