French investigators have ended their search for human remains in the Alps where a Germanwings passenger jet crashed last month, killing all 150 people on board, a local official said on Saturday.
Prosecutors believe that German copilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately flew the Airbus A320 jet into the mountainside during a flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf, pulverizing the aircraft and making recovery efforts extremely complicated.
“The search for bodies is over, but the search for the victims’ personal belongings is continuing,” a spokesman for the local government authority in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region told Reuters. “Lufthansa has also hired a specialist firm to remove the debris of the aircraft, under the authority of the French public prosecutor and an expert in charge of environmental supervision of the operations.”
Photo: AFP
Lufthansa AG is the parent company of the low-cost Germanwings carrier.
The identification of victims is to continue through the analysis of 150 sets of DNA samples found at site, which could take several weeks.
The prosecutor leading the French legal probe has said that the number of DNA sets does not necessarily mean that all the victims have been found.
As soon as a DNA set is matched to one of the victims, the family would immediately be informed, officials said.
Work to remove aircraft debris and clean up the site is to start this week and could take up to two months, regional French police commander General David Galtier said.
Cockpit audio recordings from the first black box, recovered hours after the crash on March 24, led prosecutors to believe that Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and put the airplane into a steep descent.
This version of events appeared to be further corroborated by data from the second black box recorder that was recovered last week.
In another development, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) had voiced concerns over Germany’s “nonconformity” with air safety rules before the Germanwings crash, especially regarding the monitoring of air crew health, a spokesman told reporters on Saturday.
The EU agency “had pointed out several cases of nonconformity,” EASA spokesman Dominique Fouda said, confirming a Wall Street Journal report.
“On the basis of the EASA recommendations, the European Commission launched, in late 2014, a process calling for accountability from Germany,” he said.
According to Saturday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, “EU officials said Germany’s air-safety regulator suffered from chronic staffing shortfalls that could undermine its ability to run checks of carriers and crew, including medical checks.”
An EU Commission spokesman told reporters that, based on the EASA findings, it had “told Germany to get its aviation industry in conformity” with the rules.
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