Lufthansa to pay 50 thousand euros to Germanwings crash victims' families
|Photo: AFP


Germany's airline giant Lufthansa has decided to pay 50 thousand euros as a financial support to the families of the Germanwings flight crash victims, said media reports.The rescue operations to find the bodies of the victims have been continuing and it has been reported that they might take approximately two weeks to find all the bodies. There were 144 passengers and six crew members in the plane which was flying from Barcelona to Dusseldorf but crashed over the French Alps on Tuesday. The German daily Bild reported on Saturday that the co-pilot who is suspected of deliberately crashing a passenger plane in the French Alps told his ex-girlfriend he was in psychiatric treatment, and that he was planning a spectacular gesture that everyone would remember.The newspaper published an interview with a woman who said she had had a relationship in 2014 with Andreas Lubitz, the man French prosecutors believe locked himself alone into the cockpit of the Germanwings Airbus on Tuesday and steered it into a mountain. "When I heard about the crash, I remembered a sentence, over and over again, that he said," the woman, a flight attendant of 26 named only as Maria W., told Bild. "'One day I'll do something that will change the system, and then everyone will know my name and remember it'.""I didn't know what he meant by that at the time, but now it's obvious," she said."He did it because he realized that, due to his health problems, his big dream of working at Lufthansa, of a having job as a pilot, and as a pilot on long-distance flights, was nearly impossible.""He never talked much about his illness, only that he was in psychiatric treatment."German authorities said on Friday they had found torn-up sick notes showing that the co-pilot was suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy. Germanwings, the budget airline of the flag carrier Lufthansa, has said he had not submitted any sick note at the time.Maria W. told the paper: "We always talked a lot about work and then he became a different person. He became upset about the conditions we worked under: too little money, fear of losing the contract, too much pressure."A Lufthansa spokesman declined to comment.