How Germanwings Co-Pilot Hid Secret Mental Illness

The co-pilot who crashed his plane into a mountain killing himself and 149 people hid a secret illness from his employers, German prosecutors have revealed.

‘Obsessive’ Andreas Lubitz locked the captain out of the Airbus A320’s cockpit before setting the plane’s controls to descend into a rocky valley, it emerged yesterday.

Following a search of Lubitz’s Dusseldorf apartment, investigators today revealed they had found old torn-up sick leave notes, current ones and one issued for the day of the disaster.

Prosecutors said the finds indicate 28-year-old Lubitz may have had a medical condition which he kept secret from his employers, budget airline Germanwings. They have found no suicide note or claim of responsibility and no evidence of a political or religious motivation for his actions.

As the revelations emerged, families of those killed in the disaster expressed fury that Germanwings allowed Lubitz to fly a plane. Claude Driessens, whose 59-year-old brother died on the Airbus A320, said the co-pilot should not have been anywhere near the cockpit.

Responding to the developments, Mr Driessens said: ‘Looking back, I slowly start to be angry. I don’t understand how a serious company can let a depressed man pilot a plane.

‘Because the boy was depressed, it was necessary to say he was. It’s not normal to leave somebody by himself in charge, and who shuts the doors, I’m very angry.’

Prosecutor’s spokesman Ralf Herrenbrueck today said in a written statement that torn-up sick notes for the day of the crash ‘support the current preliminary assessment that the deceased hid his illness from his employer and colleagues’.

Mr Herrenbrueck said documents found indicated ‘an existing illness and appropriate medical treatment’ , but he didn’t confirm details of what illness Lubitz was suffering from. Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, refused to comment on the new information.

German police are now investigating whether Lubitz had stopped taking any medication he was on and today questioned chemists at the Apotheke am Breidenplatz close to Lubitz’s Dusseldorf flat.

Lubitz regularly collected a prescription from the pharmacy, MailOnline understands. A chemist at the Apotheke confirmed she had spoken to the police but declined to offer any details.

The chemist told MailOnline: ‘The police have visited the pharmacy this morning. But I cannot talk about anything that occurs inside the pharmacy. We are required to protect all information about patients.’

As well as having been signed off from training with depression in 2008, it was reported this morning that Lubitz had continued to receive mental health support up until this week’s crash.

Friends have told how Lubitz, whose pilot’s licence was up for renewal in June, had a life-long obsession with planes and ‘would have died’ if he had not have passed his flying exams.

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