Reuters/AFP/DPA/Berlin

The co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing a passenger plane in the French Alps told his girlfriend he was in psychiatric treatment, and that he was planning a spectacular gesture that everyone would remember, the German daily Bild reported yesterday.
The newspaper published an interview with a woman who said she had had a relationship in 2014 with Andreas Lubitz, the man French prosecutors believe locked himself alone into the cockpit of the Germanwings Airbus on Tuesday and steered it into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board.
“When I heard about the crash, I remembered a sentence, over and over again, that he said,” the woman, a 26-year-old flight attendant the paper gave the fictional name of Maria W to protect her identity, told Bild. “’One day I’ll do something that will change the system, and then everyone will know my name and remember it’.”
“I didn’t know what he meant by that at the time, but now it’s obvious,” she said. “He did it because he realised that, due to his health problems, his big dream of working at Lufthansa, of a having job as a pilot, and as a pilot on long-distance flights, was nearly impossible.”
“He never talked much about his illness, only that he was in psychiatric treatment,” she told the paper, adding they broke up because she was afraid of him.
“He would suddenly freak out in conversations and yell at me,” she recalled. “At night he would wake up screaming ‘we are crashing’ because he had nightmares. He could be good at hiding what was really going on inside him.”
German authorities said on Friday that they had found torn-up sick notes showing that the co-pilot was suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy.
Germanwings, the budget airline of the flag carrier Lufthansa, has said that he had not submitted any sick note at the time.
The woman also told the paper: “We always talked a lot about work and then he became a different person. He became upset about the conditions we worked under: too little money, fear of losing the contract, too much pressure.”
A Lufthansa spokesman declined to comment.
However, the company and its lost-cost subsidiary Germanwings took out full-page advertisements in major German newspapers yesterday, expressing its “deepest mourning”.
Lufthansa and Germanwings offered condolences to the friends and families of the passengers and crew and thanked the thousands of people in France, Spain and Germany who have been of help since the crash.
German officials said there would be a ceremony on April 17 in Cologne Cathedral that would also be attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as senior government officials from other countries such as France and Spain.
Lubitz was a member of the flying club in his hometown of Montabaur and regularly came to the area of Sisteron – some 50km from the crash site in France – with his parents as an adolescent to practice gliding, club member Francis Kefer said.
Kefer said the family regularly vacationed in the area between 1996 and 2003, adding another perplexing dimension to a case that German and French investigators are racing to unravel.
Another member of Lubitz’s flying club, Dieter Wagner, told Reuters television that the Germanwings co-pilot took part in one of the regular trips the club made to the Alps and that he apparently knew the region well.
However he added: “I don’t think he picked the place out, I don’t know. It would be too much of a coincidence...”
Germanwings pilot Frank Woiton was quoted by Bild as saying that he had flown with Lubitz who had spoken about his ambitions to become a captain and fly long-distance routes.
He said Lubitz handled the plane well and “therefore I also left him alone in the cockpit to go to the toilet”, he told the newspaper.  
Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr has said that Lubitz had suspended his pilot training, which began in 2008, “for a certain period”, before restarting and qualifying for the Airbus A320 in 2013.
The second-in-command had passed all psychological tests required for training, he told reporters on Thursday.
Yesterday several German newspapers questioned whether doctor-patient confidentiality should always apply.
“The case of Andreas Lubitz has already sparked a debate on whether medical confidentiality for professions like pilots must be limited,” said the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
Germany is to hold a national memorial ceremony and service on April 17 for the victims of Tuesday’s disaster, half of whom were German, with Spain accounting for at least 50 and the remainder composed of more than a dozen other nationalities.
Around 500 people attended a religious ceremony early yesterday in the town of Digne-les-Bains, about 40km south of the remote Alpine crash zone where searchers are recovering the victims’ remains and evidence.
Candles for each of the victims were placed in front of the cathedral’s altar.