Families of victims mark 10 years since Germanwings plane crashed in the French Alps
The plane departed in the morning of March 24, 2015, in Barcelona, Spain and was supposed to land a few hours later in Duesseldorf, Germany. But it never arrived because, investigators said, the plane was deliberately downed by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz.
The victims included a group of 15 students and two teachers from a high school in the western German town of Haltern am See who were flying home from an exchange trip to Spain.
Also killed were two babies, a pair of acclaimed German opera singers and a member of an Argentine rock band, three generations of the same family, a vacationing mother and son, a recently married couple, people on business trips and others going home.
Memorial ceremonies are planned for 10:41 a.m. — the moment of the crash — at the German high school that lost so many students and also in the French village of Le Vernet, near the crash site in the mountains.
In Haltern, high school students will lay down white roses for the victims and the town's church bells will ring.
'There was hardly a family that wasn't affected somewhere in their circle of friends or relatives," the high school's principal, Christian Krahl, told German news agency dpa.
Many family members also traveled to Le Vernet. Lufthansa, which owned Germanwings, is inviting the victims' relatives every year to the village near the crash site and is expecting around 300 mourners to attend this year's memorial service, dpa reported.
Commemorations are also planned at the airports in Düsseldorf and Barcelona. At Düsseldorf Airport, a book of condolences was available in the so-called Room of Silence for employees and travelers, dpa reported.
The crash shocked and caused disbelief when investigators revealed that co-pilot Lubitz locked the flight's captain out of the cockpit to deliberately set the plane on a collision course with a mountainside.
Lubitz had in the past suffered from depression, but authorities and his airline later deemed him fit to fly. In the months ahead of the crash, Lubitz suffered from sleeplessness and feared losing his vision, but he hid that from his employer.
'This state of shock, the deeply felt sympathy of all the residents for the families and the question of why this happened are still with us today,' Haltern Mayor Andreas Stegemann told dpa.
'The Germanwings crash is a permanent part of our town's history,' he said.
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