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HALTERN AM SEE, Germany (AP) — Victims' relatives traveled to the scene in the French Alps of the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 10 years ago Monday, while hundreds of people gathered in silence to mark the anniversary in a German town that was home to an 18-member school group on board the doomed plane.
The plane took off from Barcelona, Spain on the morning of March 24, 2015, and was supposed to land in Duesseldorf, Germany. But it never arrived because, investigators said, the plane was deliberately downed by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz. All 150 people on board were killed.
The victims included a group of 16 students and two teachers from a high school in the western German town of Haltern am See who were flying home from an exchange trip to Spain.
Also killed were two babies, a pair of acclaimed German opera singers and a member of an Argentine rock band, three generations of the same family, a vacationing mother and son, a recently married couple, people on business trips and others going home. Most came from Germany and Spain, though the victims came from 17 different countries in total.
Many victims' families traveled to the crash site in southeastern France. In the nearby village of Le Vernet, local officials and Carsten Spohr, the chief executive of Germanwings parent Lufthansa, laid flowers.
In Haltern, students laid roses in the yard of the Joseph König high school, and hundreds of people who gathered in the rain in front of a plaque with the victims' names fell silent at 10:41 a.m., the moment of the crash.
The school's principal, Christian Krahl, said it remains important to remember the tragedy even though today's students didn't experience it, German news agency dpa reported. “We want to be close to those who are infinitely sad to this day,” he said.
Wreaths were laid at the town cemetery, where there is a memorial in the form of a schoolroom and some of the students are buried.
Commemorations were also planned at the airports in Duesseldorf and Barcelona. At Duesseldorf Airport, a book of condolences was available in the so-called Room of Silence for employees and travelers.
The crash caused shock and disbelief when investigators revealed that co-pilot Lubitz locked the flight’s captain out of the cockpit to deliberately set the plane on a collision course with a mountainside.
Lubitz had in the past suffered from depression, but authorities and his airline later deemed him fit to fly. In the months ahead of the crash, Lubitz suffered from sleeplessness and feared losing his vision, but he hid that from his employer.
“This state of shock, the deeply felt sympathy of all the residents for the families and the question of why this happened are still with us today,” Haltern Mayor Andreas Stegemann told dpa.
“The Germanwings crash is a permanent part of our town’s history,” he said.
The site of the crash in France is now marked by a 5-meter (16-foot) “Solar Orb,” meant to represent the sun and the five continents. The memorial, made up of 149 gilded aluminum plates — marking all those on board except the co-pilot — was erected in 2017.
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Grieshaber reported from Berlin. Associated Press journalist Laurent Cipriani in Le Vernet, France contributed to this report.
