BERLIN
The co-pilot of the crashed Germanwings plane had received psychotherapy for suicidal tendency, German prosecutors have said.
Dusseldorf’s Chief Public Prosecutor Ralf Herrenbrueck said on Monday that medical documents found at the house of co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had revealed that he had received treatment for the condition.
"The co-pilot had received psychotherapy for suicidal tendency for a long period, many years, before he obtained his pilot’s license," Herrenbrueck said in a written statement on Monday.
German media reported the 27-year-old co-pilot had to interrupt his flight training by Lufthansa in 2008, due to serious depression.
But he successfully concluded the training in the following years and obtained a pilot’s license in 2012.
German prosecutors said current medical records found at the house of the co-pilot in Dusseldorf did not indicate a continued suicidal tendency.
'No aggression'
“In the following period, up until his recent visits to doctors who gave him sick notes, no suicidal tendency or outward aggression was documented,” Herrenbrueck said.
The authorities suspect that the 27-year-old Lubitz intentionally crashed the airplane in southern France on Tuesday, killing all 150 people on board.
The examination of the black box voice recorder strengthened the suspicion that the co-pilot intentionally kept the pilot outside the cockpit and took the Germanwings plane into a dive.
Police had found several medical certificates at the house of the co-pilot last week, showing that he was not capable of working on the day of the tragedy.
Lubitz was undergoing medical treatment, but he had kept the fact secret from his employers, according to the documents.
Motives unclear
Chief Public Prosecutor Ralf Herrenbrueck said Monday that they have not found anything that shows that the co-pilot had any organic illness.
The examination of seized documents and interviews with co-pilot’s friends and colleagues also did not reveal any motive on Lubit's part, he said.
No suicide note nor letter indicating a political or religious background was found during the searches in the co-pilot’s house.
Germany’s largest airline Lufthansa, which owns Germanwings, declined to comment on the recent revelations on Monday.
Lufthansa’s Chief Executive Officer Carsten Spohr confirmed last week that Lubitz had to interrupt his pilot training in the past, but did not give any details on the reasons.
He said the co-pilot joined Germanwings in 2013, after successfully completing all the tests, including a psychological test.
“He was 100 percent fit to fly without any restrictions,” Spohr said.
Deadly crash
The Germanwings Airbus 320 was en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf in Germany, when it went down on Tuesday before 11 a.m. local time (10:00 GMT) after an eight-minute descent, killing 144 passengers and six crew members on board.
The majority of the victims were German and Spanish.
The air disaster is one of the most tragic incidents in recent German aviation history, and the first deadly crash of a Germanwings plane since the low-budget airline was founded by Germany’s largest airline, Lufthansa, in 2002.
The crash was also the first on French soil since July 25, 2000, when an Air France Concorde crashed into a hotel in Gonesse in the Val-d'Oise, shortly after taking off from Roissy-CDG airport, killing 13 German passengers and crew members, along with four others on the ground.
