German prosecutors searched the offices of five doctors whose help was sought by the co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing a Germanwings plane in the French Alps, a German magazine said on Friday.
Der Spiegel said they secured medical records, citing a summary of the prosecutors' findings. The magazine will publish the story on Saturday.
Once the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz's name became public, several doctors came forward to say he had visited them, Der Spiegel said. He saw specialists for both neurology and psychiatry, it added, although it was unclear whether this information also came from the prosecutors' findings.
The public prosecutors’ office in Duesseldorf, where Lubitz had a home, was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Reuters.
French accident investigators said on Friday that a second ‘black box’ recovered from the Germanwings crash site indicated that Lubitz deliberately crashed the airplane.
The flight data recorder found on Thursday appears to corroborate evidence from a cockpit audio recording recovered from a first ‘black box‘ hours after the March 24 crash.
“A first reading shows that the pilot in the cockpit used the automatic pilot to put the airplane on a descent towards an altitude of 100 feet,“ the BEA investigation office said in a statement.
“Then several times the pilot modified the automatic pilot settings to increase the speed of the airplane as it descended,“ it added.
Prosecutors have said the cockpit audio recording from the first ‘black box‘ suggested that 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and set the plane on course to crash in the French Alps.
The flight data recorder contains a detailed readout of hundreds of parameters, including any commands made from the co-pilot‘s seat on the Duesseldorf-bound flight.
The BEA said that they were still working to establish the facts surrounding the flight leading up to the crash, which killed 150 people.
Lubitz‘s motives remain a mystery but investigators have uncovered growing evidence that he had made suicide preparations ahead of the doomed flight.
German prosecutors said on Thursday that Lubitz had made Internet searches on ways to commit suicide in the days ahead of the crash as searches about cockpit doors and safety precautions.
Reuters