° 70 WEEKS AFTER THE DISASTER °
A family member who lost his daughter, young grandson and son-in-law in the Germanwings disaster has filed several criminal charges, including those against the 27-year-old co-pilot´s parents and girlfriend. He makes serious accusations.
A. Lubitz’s mother and girlfriend were in contact with the doctors who treated him. His mother even accompanied him to a consultation with the psychologist – just a few weeks before he crashed the Airbus.
I´m convinced that the numerous medications he took changed him; at least as a mother you would have to notice that. There´s also the matter of the boxes of medicine said to have been lying around openly in the room.
All this also suggests to me the logical conclusion that they knew of his desolate state of health but didn´t prevent him from continuing to pilot passenger planes. Did they at least try to discuss it with him? Seek advice from a third party?
And why did the family wait for A. Lubitz to return to his Düsseldorf apartment on 24 March 2015, of all days, as the records suggest? Did they suspect anything? When he didn’t arrive, his girlfriend packed a bag with his medication and doctor’s records. Strange!
It´s been reported that the co-pilot wrote a living will one day before the disaster. Is that a coincidence?
Mr. Radner wants to find out the truth. I hope there will be answers. Conclusive explanations of all the events surrounding flight 4U9525 would calm me down a little.
Friends and acquaintances describe A. Lubitz as friendly and sociable. Often I ask myself how he grew up. Experts like to emphasise how important childhood is for a person’s development. Was he strictly raised? Was he under pressure as a result of his parents´ expectations? What was his school time like? Was he a dominant child or was he teased?
It´s my opinion that he was already frustrated before he became aware that he could lose his flying license forever due to the renewed deterioration of his psyche.
He suffered the first depressive episode between August 2008 and July 2009 and had to undergo psychotherapeutic treatment.
With the loss of his job he feared he wouldn´t be able to repay the loan for his expensive pilot training. In addition, there was his fear of going blind. It can be assumed that his mental ailments were responsible for his disrupted vision. A. Lubitz must have been under severe stress. He consumed drugs, i.e. sleeping pills and psychotropic drugs, which obviously did little to combat his insomnia and depression.
He is said to have searched the internet for effective suicide methods. He should have killed only himself. Was he so scared of failure that he felt the need to make his mark by dragging the passengers on the plane to their deaths? He made a conscious decision to accept the deaths of those who trusted him, including children, babies and pregnant women.
The violence of this year’s July unfortunately only adds to my gloomy reflections:
On 14 July, France’s national holiday, a 31-year-old Tunisian randomly plowed a refrigerated truck into a group of revelers on the beach promenade in Nice. 85 people lost their lives and more than 300 were injured. Those close to the killer knew that he drank alcohol, suffered from depression and underwent psychological treatment years ago. Evidently he wasn´t coping with the fact that his wife and three children had left him. He´d never been religious or sighted in a mosque.
Police investigations revealed he had researched online for opportunities to carry out suicide bombings.
On 18 July a 17-year-old refugee from Afghanistan struck the passengers on a regional train near Würzburg with an axe or stabbed them with a knife. Five were seriously injured. Those who knew the man explained that he had a friendly character. Nobody had thought of him as radical before.
Four days later, on 22 July, there was a shooting in the Olympic shopping centre in Munich. The 18-year-old killer was born in Germany with Iranian-born parents. He killed 9 passengers and injured 35. His father mentioned a mental illness, which he had been treated for last year in hospital and on an out-patient basis. He fell ill with depression and phobias. Others said he was shy or even anxious, that his peers had cruelly bullied him and that he had no friends. He is said to have planned the attack for some time.
On 24 July a 27-year-old Syrian blew himself up near a music festival with 2500 visitors in Ansbach. He died and 15 people were injured, some severely. A flatmate said he had never seen him pray. Apparently he was not a fanatic Muslim although the authorities suspect an Islamic background. He was depressed, traumatised and suicidal.
Now one could draw the conclusion that depressed and psychologically disturbed people are potential mass murderers. If this were true, humanity would have wiped itself out long ago because depression is now regarded as a widespread disease. Other components such as the social environment and personality structure of the person concerned must have an effect, and interact in a complex way, leading to such crimes. It doesn’t matter to me whether you kill for yourself or for a religion. This may be important for the investigative and security authorities. Terrorists as well as people who run amok, be they drivers or pilots, kill people. This gives them a moment of absolute power between life and death. They assassinate in order to be able to give their personal problems an outlet and deliberately create fear and horror. That is their ultimate goal. They want to draw attention to themselves and make a gigantic exit, knowing full well that everyone will be talking about them. Whether this happens in the context of a faith like IS is not necessarily essential because some of the murderers had never been involved with it before they acted. They sometimes claim responsibility for the attack, but whether they acted on behalf of IS is often not proven.
The trenches of blood left behind by assassins are multiplying and affecting public life around the globe. They are filled with countless victims, their edges bordered by an army of traumatised survivors. Every day there are more.
© Brigitte Voß / Translation: Ellen Rosenbaum
A TEAR IN MY SOUL 