Officials: Co-Pilot intentionally crashed plane in Alps

PARIS (AP) - Ignoring the captain's frantic pounding on the door, the co-pilot of the Germanwings jet barricaded himself inside the cockpit and deliberately rammed the plane full speed into the French Alps as passengers screamed in terror, a prosecutor said Thursday.In a split second, all 150 people aboard were dead.Andreas Lubitz's "intention (was) to destroy this plane," Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said, laying out the horrifying conclusions French investigators reached after listening to the final minutes of Tuesday's Flight 9525 from the plane's black box voice data recorder.German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the conclusions brought the tragedy to a "new, simply incomprehensible dimension."The prosecutor said there was no indication of terrorism, though he did not say why investigators do not suspect a political motive. The inquiry is instead focusing on the co-pilot's "personal, family and professional environment" to try to determine why he did it, Robin said.The Airbus A320 was flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf when it lost radio contact with air traffic controllers and began dropping from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. The prosecutor said Lubitz did not say a word as he manually set the plane on an eight-minute descent into the craggy French mountainside that pulverized the plane.He said the German co-pilot's responses, initially courteous in the first part of the trip, became "curt" when the captain began the mid-flight briefing on the planned landing.Robin said the pilot, who has not been identified, left the cockpit when the plane reached cruising altitude, presumably to go to the lavatory. Then the 27-year-old co-pilot took control of the jet as requested."When he was alone, the co-pilot manipulated the buttons of the flight monitoring system to initiate the aircraft's descent," Robin said.The pilot knocked several times "without response," the prosecutor said, adding that the cockpit door can only be blocked manually from the inside.The co-pilot said nothing from the moment the captain left, Robin said. "It was absolute silence in the cockpit."