Officials say that the Germanwings plane that crashed earlier this week, killing all 150 people aboard, was apparently brought down deliberately by the plane's co-pilot.
According to Reuters, a prosecutor in Marseille, France claims that 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz, a German national, was piloting Germanwings Flight 9525 by himself when it crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday morning. After the captain left the cockpit, he was reportedly unable to re-open the door:
Earlier, a German state prosecutor had said that just one of the two pilots of the Germanwings airliner was in the cockpit at the time it went down.
The statements came after the New York Times reported that black box recordings showed one of the pilots had left the cockpit and could not get back in before the plane crashed.
One was in the cockpit and the other wasn't, Christoph Kumpa at the prosecutors' office in Duesseldorf told Reuters by telephone, adding that the information came from investigators in France.
Reuters adds that investigators are still analyzing the recordings captured by one black boxes, while continuing to look for the other. At this time, it's still unclear why the captain left the cockpit.
Lastly, a French prosecutor told Reuters that there's no evidence at the moment to suggest that Lubitz was a terrorist, nor is the tragedy being treated as an act of terrorism.
[via Reuters]
