One Turkish-German among 150 victims in Germanwings plane crash

MARSEILLE

Germanwings Airbus A320. File photo

One German citizen of Turkish descent was on the plane operated by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline that crashed in southern France on March 24 en route from Barcelona to Düsseldorf, killing 150 people, Turkish Foreign Ministry has announced.

In its statement, the ministry denied the report of a Catalan news outlet which earlier claimed that there were 39 Turkish passengers in the plane.

French President François Hollande, on the other hand, said that he could not say with "total certainty" that no French nationals were aboard the Germanwings flight.

Hollande added that the crash site was in a very remote, difficult to reach area, and that search and rescue teams are doing everything they can to access the site.

Germanwings said there were 144 passengers and six crew on the aircraft, adjusting an earlier toll.
     
French aviation authorities had earlier said there were 142 passengers and six flight personnel on board and that all were dead.
      
"In light of the information available at the present time we cannot say whether there are survivors or how many there might be," Germanwings chief executive, Oliver Wagner, said in a brief statement on German television.
     
"The cause is at present unknown," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in a separate statement.

A spokesman for the DGAC aviation authority, on the other hand, said the airplane crashed near the town of Barcelonnette about 100 km (65 miles) north of the French Riviera city of Nice.

The crashed A320 is 24 years old and has been with the parent Lufthansa group since 1991, according to online database airfleets.net

The plane issued a distress call at 10:47 am (0947 GMT), sources speaking to AFP said.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who said debris from the plane had already been found, was heading to the scene.

Shares in Airbus, the European aerospace giant, slumped on news of the accident, down 1.77 percent to 58.94 euros at 1100 GMT after briefly sliding two percent.

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Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said  he was "shocked" by the crash.
      
"Shocked by the air accident in the Alps. A tragedy. We are cooperating with the French and German authorities in the investigation," he said in a Twitter message after \french officials said nobody survided the accident.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke to Hollande and Rajoy by telephone and "cancelled her appointments to follow developments", the spokesman, Steffen Seibert, said in a statement.