French investigators have ended their search for bodies in the Alps where a Germanwings passenger jet crashed last month, killing all 150 people on board, a local official said on Saturday.
Prosecutors believe German co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately flew the Airbus A320 jet into the mountainside during a flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, pulverising the aircraft and making recovery efforts extremely complicated.
"The search for bodies is over, but the search for the victims' personal belongings is continuing," a spokesman for the local government authority in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region told Reuters.
Lufthansa is the parent company of the lowcost Germanwings carrier.
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As soon as a DNA set is matched to one of the victims, the family will immediately be informed.
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Cockpit audio recordings from the first black box, recovered hours after the March 24 crash, led prosecutors to believe that Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and put the plane into a steep descent.
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A separate German legal inquiry has pointed to mental health problems affecting the 27-year-old Lubitz.
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Lufthansa has said Lubitz told its flight school in 2009 he had gone through a period of severe depression.
© Thomson Reuters 2015
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