A German jetliner en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany, plunged from the sky on Tuesday and slammed into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.
One of the plane’s black box recorders has been found at the crash site, about 100 km (65 miles) north of the Riviera city of Nice, and will be examined immediately, France’s interior minister said. Aerial photographs showed smoldering wreckage and a piece of the fuselage with six windows strewn across the steep mountainside cut by ravines.
Germanwings believed 67 Germans had been on the flight. Spain’s deputy prime minister said 45 passengers had Spanish names. One Belgian was also aboard. Also among the victims were 16 children and two teachers from the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in the town of Haltern am See in northwest Germany, a spokeswoman said. Barcelona’s Liceu opera house said on Twitter that two singers, Kazakhstan-born Oleg Bryjak and German Maria Radner, had died while returning to Duesseldorf after they had performed in Wagner’s Siegfried at the theater.
French police at the crash site about 2,000 meters (6,000 feet) above sea level said no one had survived and it would take days to recover the bodies due to difficult terrain, snow and incoming storms. They estimated that it would take “at least a week” to scour the remote site. More than 300 policemen and 380 firefighters have been mobilized in the effort, according to Agence France-Presse.
France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, has told RTL radio all options must be looked into to explain why the Airbus A320 ploughed into an Alpine mountainside on Tuesday but a terrorist attack is not the most likely scenario.