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Prosecutors: Co-Pilot's Computer Shows Searches On Suicide, Cockpit Doors

Mountain troops, police and gendarme officers listen during a briefing before heading to the Germanwings crash site Thursday in Seyne-les-Alpes, France. A French prosecutor said Thursday the plane's second black box has been recovered.
Claude Paris
/
AP
Mountain troops, police and gendarme officers listen during a briefing before heading to the Germanwings crash site Thursday in Seyne-les-Alpes, France. A French prosecutor said Thursday the plane's second black box has been recovered.

Updated at 1:13 a.m. ET

German prosecutors say the co-pilot of the Germanwings plane who crashed the aircraft into the French Alps on March 24 apparently used his tablet computer to search the Internet for ways to commit suicide and for the safety features of cockpit doors. Separately, French prosecutors say the second black box of Flight 4U 9525 has been recovered.

The Internet searches covered the dates March 16 to March 23. One search was related to "medical treatment ... and the possibilities of [committing] suicide," German prosecutors said. They added: "On at least one day, the person also spent several minutes trying out search terms for cockpit doors and their security protection."

Investigators say they believe co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 27, deliberately crashed Flight 4U 9525 into the French Alps, killing himself and 149 others. They came to that conclusion after the recovery last week of the flight's voice recorder near the scene of the crash.

On Thursday, French prosecutors said they had recovered the aircraft's second black box — the data recorder.

Together, the two black boxes — the voice recorder and the data recorder — will give investigators more insight into what happened inside the cockpit of the plane that was flying from Barcelona, Spain, to Duesseldorf, Germany.

At a news conference, French prosecutor Brice Robin said more than 2,800 fragments had been recovered by teams on the ground. And, he said, 158 DNA profiles had been isolated by the laboratory.

"That doesn't mean that we've identified the 150 victims," Robin said.

You can find our full coverage of this story here.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Krishnadev Calamur is NPR's deputy Washington editor. In this role, he helps oversee planning of the Washington desk's news coverage. He also edits NPR's Supreme Court coverage. Previously, Calamur was an editor and staff writer at The Atlantic. This is his second stint at NPR, having previously worked on NPR's website from 2008-15. Calamur received an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri.

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