Germanwings has offered the families of the victims of the French Alps air disaster "up to 50,000 euros ($54,806) per passenger" towards their immediate costs, a spokesman said Friday.
The assistance, which the families would not be required to pay back, was separate from the compensation that the airline will likely have to pay over the disaster, a Germanwings spokesman told AFP, confirming a report by Tagesspiegel daily.
Tagesspiegel quoted a specialist in aviation law, Holger Hopperdietzelm, as saying Lufthansa, Germanwings' parent company, faced a compensation bill ranging from several tens of thousands of euros to several hundreds of thousands of euros per victim.
The liability of airlines in accidents was decided at a 1999 convention in Montreal, which settled on a cap of 143,000 euros per victim.
Insurance specialists told AFP the fact that the co-pilot apparently deliberately crashed the jet into the mountainside would not affect the issue of compensation.
The fact that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz hid a serious illness from his bosses, as revealed by German prosecutors Friday, did "not bring the exclusion clause in Lufthansa's insurance policy into play", the legal manager who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity said.
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