French Alpine village mourns Germanwings crash victims decade on
The Airbus A320 belonging to Lufthansa's low-cost carrier Germanwings met its end on March 24th, 2015 near the small Alpine village of Le Vernet while on its way from Barcelona to Duesseldorf.
The crash killed all 144 passengers and six crew - a group of people from 20 countries, among them 72 Germans and 50 Spaniards.
Families of the victims in Le Vernet on Monday marked a minute of silence at 10.41am, the exact moment a decade earlier when their loved ones died.
Several French, German and Spanish officials laid wreaths in Le Vernet's cemetery, where unidentified victims were buried in a mass grave.
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Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr said the tragedy still haunted the company and guided its thinking on "responsibility".
Former mayor Bertrand Bartolini told AFP that visiting the crash site, where rescuers retrieved thousands of body parts amid the wreckage, had deeply scarred him.
It was a "place of absolute horror," he said. "I saw things there that I will never be able to talk about."
Grief-stricken families and media soon poured into the remote community, and Bartolini found himself having to sign death certificates for 150 people in multiple copies.
He said he still remembers the German couple who died with their 18-month-old son and the recently married Moroccan couple who had planned to board an earlier flight but were delayed for bureaucratic reasons.
The victims also included 16 students and two teachers from a high school in the western German town of Haltern am See.
The teenagers and staff were heading home after a week-long school exchange in Spain.
But as flight 4U 9525 cruised above France, 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, who had depression, took the decision that sealed the fate of everyone aboard.
When the pilot, Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, left the cockpit for a bathroom break, Lubitz locked the door behind him and set the autopilot into a steady descent.
In the flight's last minutes, the voice recorder only picks up Lubitz's breathing as he ignores calls from air traffic controllers while the screaming pilot tries to pry open the door with a crowbar.
Nina Theaudin, a German who runs a nearby campsite, helped interpret for the families of the victims when they arrived in Le Vernet afterwards.
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She told AFP she had developed long-term relationships with some of those relatives over the years as they returned to the area to hike up to the crash site.
She became friends with the family of a teenage girl from Haltern am See who died in the crash, and her own daughter went to stay with them in 10th grade.
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