After weeks of waiting and wondering when they could begin to seek closure, the families of 44 of the 150 victims from a Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps more than two months ago were on Wednesday preparing to receive the remains of their loved ones.
A Lufthansa cargo plane carrying the coffins of many of the German victims landed late on Tuesday at Dusseldorf airport from Marseille in France. French investigators have spent the past 11 weeks sifting through evidence recovered from the site where the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, is believed to have deliberately steered the Airbus A320, headed to Dusseldorf from Barcelona, Spain, into a mountainside.
Secondary school students
Among the first of the 72 German dead to be repatriated were 16 secondary school students from the town of Haltern am See, about 80km from Dusseldorf. The group of 10th graders, along with two teachers, had been on its way home from a Spanish language exchange with a partner school near Barcelona.
After a brief ceremony at a hangar at the airport, the families will be allowed to collect their loved ones and depart for their home cities. Many of the families from Haltern organised a procession to bring the students home later yesterday.
Psychological step
Elmar Giemulla, a lawyer who is representing many of the victims’ families, including those from Haltern, said the repatriation was an important psychological step.
“For a lot of these people, they still have the last image in their mind of their children waving goodbye from the airport” on their way to Spain, he said. “This is why getting back the remains is so important. Now they see the coffins and they know their children are inside. They are confronted with reality.”
The procession, a motorcade of white hearses, is expected to pass by the victims’ school, Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium, where 18 young trees now stand in memory of the classmates and teachers lost in the crash. A plaque bearing their names will also be added to the memorial, said Ulrich Wessel, the school principal.
Lufthansa said the remains of the other victims would be repatriated for burial in the coming weeks. – (New York Times)