Co-pilot ‘planned spectacular gesture’
Print Edition
THE co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing a passenger plane in the French Alps told his girlfriend he was in psychiatric treatment, and that he was planning a spectacular gesture that everyone would remember, the German daily Bild reported yesterday.
The newspaper published an interview with a woman who said she had a relationship last year with Andreas Lubitz, the man French prosecutors believe locked himself alone into the cockpit of the Germanwings Airbus on Tuesday and steered it into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board.
“When I heard about the crash, I remembered a sentence, over and over again, that he said,” Bild quoted the 26-year-old flight attendant as saying.
“‘One day I’ll do something that will change the system, and then everyone will know my name and remember it.’” she quoted him as saying.
“I didn’t know what he meant by that at the time, but now it’s obvious,” she said.
“He did it because he realized that, due to his health problems, his big dream of working at Lufthansa, of having a job as a pilot, and of long-distance flights, was nearly impossible,” said the woman, who was identified only as Maria W. to protect her identity.
“He never talked much about his illness, only that he was in psychiatric treatment,” she said, adding they finally broke up because she feared him.
“He would suddenly freak out in conversations and yell at me,” she said.
“At night he would wake up screaming ‘we are crashing’ because he had nightmares.”
German authorities said on Friday they had found torn-up sick notes showing that the co-pilot was suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy.
A spokesman for Lufthansa declined to comment on the claims, but the company and its subsidiary Germanwings took out full-page advertisements in major German newspapers yesterday, expressing its “deepest mourning.”
German officials said a memorial ceremony will be on April 17 in Cologne Cathedral, which will be attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and senior government officials from other countries.
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