A French prosecutor revealed Thursday that Germanwings flight 9525 co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked himself in the cockpit and deliberately crashed the airliner into a mountain.
Airbus A320 was on its way to Dusseldorf from Barcelona Tuesday morning when it veered into the Alps, killing all 150 people on board. No distress signal was sent and attempts by ground control to contact the plane were unsuccessful.
French and German officials stopped short of calling it a suicide mission but said there is no indication Lubitz carried out a terrorist attack.
"He voluntarily...allowed the loss of altitude of the plane, which he had no reason to do. He had...no reason to stop the pilot-in-command from coming back in the cockpit. He had no reason to refuse to answer to the air controller who was alerting him on the loss of altitude," Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said.
"Black box" voice recordings, Robin added, showed the flight captain "banging to try to smash the door down" as Lubitz calmly steered the plane; Lubitz's breathing remained steady.
Lubitz passed all his psychological tests and medical exams, according to Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr. Lubitz showed no signs of being unstable or mentally ill and had completed 630 hours of flight time with Germanwings.
"We have at Lufthansa a reporting system where crew can report without being punished their own problems or they can report about problems of others without any kind of punishment," Spohr told CNN. "That hasn't been used either in this case, so all these safety nets we are so proud of here have not worked in this case."
Among identified victims were 75 Germans, 50 Spaniards, and three Americans. Those numbers aren't officially confirmed as some passengers had dual citizenship.
The State Department named Robert Oliver as one of the Americans killed. The other two - Yvonne Selke and her daughter Emily, from Norfolk, Virginia - were identified Wednesday. Further information was not released.
A Lufthansa plane carrying around 60 family and friends of victims arrived in Marseille Thursday morning where they were transported to the crash site near Seyne-les-Alpes. Some opted to take a bus from Barcelona instead of flying.
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