A number of doctors who treated the Germanwings flight 4U9525 co-pilot Andreas Lubitz felt he was unfit to fly but did not tell his employers because of German patient secrecy laws, a French state prosecutor has said.

Lubitz, who is believed to have intentionally crashed the plane into the Alps, killing all 150 people on board, saw seven doctors in the month before the 24 March crash, including three appointments with a psychiatrist, said the Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin.

Robin, who is leading a criminal investigation into the crash, said some of the doctors felt Lubitz was psychologically unstable, and some felt he was unfit to fly, but “unfortunately that information was not reported because of medical secrecy requirements”.

In Germany, doctors risk prison if they disclose information about their patients to anyone unless there is evidence they intend to commit a serious crime or harm themselves.

Robin also said Lubitz, 27, had vision problems and feared going blind. He said Lubitz was afraid his vision problems would put his job at risk.

Robin disclosed that Lubitz saw 41 doctors in the five years before the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf crashed.

He said the investigation so far had “enabled us to confirm without a shadow of a doubt” that Lubitz “deliberately destroyed the plane and deliberately killed 150 people, including himself”.

Investigators say Lubitz locked the pilot out of the cockpit and flew the plane into a French mountainside, after having researched suicide methods and cockpit door rules and practiced an unusual descent.



The prosecutor has upgraded the investigation from a preliminary inquiry to a fully fledged manslaughter inquiry, which means the case will be passed to French investigating magistrates who can file eventual charges against people or entities.

Stéphane Gicquel, head of a disaster support group, who attended a meeting between French officials and the victims, told AFP that the “stakes” in the expanded inquiry were to find out if there had been errors or negligence in tracking the mental state of the co-pilot, who had a history of severe depression.

Gicquel said the families were shown three different reconstructions of what had happened in the cockpit.

Several expressed their anger at a delay in the return of their relatives’ remains after spelling errors on death certificates.

The mayor of the French village of Prads-Haute-Bléone, near the crash site, said there had been slight spelling errors “of foreign-sounding names” on several death certificates.

Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, said: “The repatriation of victims’ remains will continue over the next few weeks and should be finished by the end of June.”

Investigators last month finished identifying the remains of all 150 people aboard the flight.

The German lawyer Peter Kortas, whose firm represents relatives of 34 victims, told Associated Press that negotiations with Germanwings about compensation began several days ago.

The first burial is expected on Friday. Nearly half of the victims were German, 47 were Spanish and there were victims of 17 other nationalities.