Page 6 - AAA 25 March'15
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UP FRONT A3
Wednesday 25 March 2015
Europe in shock as plane crash kills 150 people
The largest pieces of debris The White House and the Lufthansa Vice President
are the size of a small car. airline chief said there was
No one can access the site no sign that terrorism was Heike Birlenbach told re-
from the ground,” Gilbert involved, and German
Sauvan, president of the Chancellor Angela Merkel porters in Barcelona that
general council, Alpes-de- urged reporters not to
Haute-Provence, told The speculate on the cause. for now “we say it is an ac-
Associated Press. “We still don’t know much
“This is pretty much the beyond the bare informa- cident.”
worst thing you can imag- tion on the flight, and there
ine,” said Bodo Klimpel, should be no speculation In Washington, the White
mayor of the German town on the cause of the crash,”
of Haltern, rent with sorrow she said in Berlin. “All that House said American offi-
after losing 16 tenth grad- will be investigated thor-
ers and their two teachers. oughly.” cials were in contact with
their French, Spanish and
German counterparts.
“There is no indication of
a nexus to terrorism at this
time,” said U.S. National Se-
curity Council spokeswom-
A student lights a candle in front of the Joseph-Koenig an Bernadette Meehan.q
Gymnasium in Haltern, western Germany Tuesday, March 24,
2015. A Germanwings plane from Barcelona crashed on its way
to Duesseldorf over the French alps, 16 school children and 2
teachers from Haltern were among the 150 people on board.
(AP Photo/Martin Meissner)
GREG KELLER from Flight 9525 on steep
and desolate slopes, fami-
ANGELA CHARLTON lies across Europe reeled
with shock and grief. Sob-
Associated Press bing relatives at both air-
ports were led away by
SEYNE-LES-ALPES, France airport workers and crisis
counselors.
(AP) — A black box recov- “The site is a picture of hor-
ror. The grief of the families
ered from the scene and and friends is immeasur-
able,” German Foreign
pulverized pieces of debris Minister Frank-Walter Stein-
meier said after being flown
strewn across Alpine moun- over the crash scene. “We
must now stand together.
tainsides held clues to what We are united in our great
grief.”
caused a budget airliner to It took investigators hours
to reach the site, led by
take an unexplained eight- mountain guides to the
craggy ravine in the south-
minute dive Tuesday mid- ern French Alps, not far
from the Italian border and
way through a flight from the French Riviera.
Video shot from a helicop-
Spain to Germany, appar- ter and aired by BFM TV
showed rescuers walking
ently killing all 150 people in the crevices of a rocky
mountainside scattered
on board. with plane parts. Photos
of the crash site showed
The victims included two white flecks of debris across
a mountain and larger air-
babies, two opera sing- plane body sections with
windows. A helicopter
ers and 16 German high crew that landed briefly in
the area saw no signs of
school students and their life, French officials said.
“Everything is pulverized.
teachers returning from an
exchange trip to Spain. It
was the deadliest crash in
France in decades.
The Airbus A320 operated
by Germanwings, a bud-
get subsidiary of Lufthansa,
was less than an hour from
landing in Duesseldorf on a
flight from Barcelona when
it unexpectedly went into
a rapid descent. The pi-
lots sent out no distress call
and had lost radio contact
with their control center,
France’s aviation authority
said, deepening the mys-
tery.
While investigators
searched through debris
