When Germanwings Flight 4U9525 crashed into French Alps on March 24 killing 150 people, including crew, "one [pilot] was in the cockpit and the other wasn't," the German prosecutors' office informed Reuters. The death toll was 148 as initially reported and is now being quoted as 150 across various news agencies. This information came forth after a voice recording was recovered by investigators. As New York Times Times points out, one of the pilots got locked out of the cockpit. "The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer. And then he hits the door stronger, and no answer. There is never an answer," a senior French military officer involved in the investigation told NYT.

Robin confirms that shortly before the plane crashed, he could hear passengers screaming in the recording. "Death was sudden and immediate," he adds, as a pacifier.

"A first officer, Lubitz had been flying for Germanwings since September 2013 after being trained with the airline’s parent company Lufthansa at its facility in Bremen. He had clocked up a total of 630 hours in the air," The Guardian reports.

Why would he kill so many people, then?

Meanwhile, the German Transport Minister has confirmed that the theory of a deliberate crash might not be far removed from reality.

Germanwings' spokesperson said, "I can only repeat what I have said over the last few days. We are really deeply shocked and I wouldn’t have been able to imagine that the situation would have got even worse."

Employees of Germanwings hug each other as they mourn in front of the company's headquarters in Cologne, Germany. Source: ABCnews

The spokesperson also confirms that Germanwings flights have a double level lock on the cockpit door, installed as a safety measure against terror attacks. The door cannot be opened even "by weapons".

The door can only be opened by a code that the crew remembers by heart. However, even if the pilot entered the code from outside, the co-pilot could have easily re-locked the door, delaying the process by another five minutes.

The company has not ruled out the possibility of suicide either. The spokesperson states, "We can only speculate what might have been the motivation of the co-pilot. In a company that prides itself on its safety record, this is a shock. We select cockpit personnel carefully."

While this might be among the most baffling cases in the history of flight tragedies, we cannot fathom the motive of a suicidal co-pilot. Why would he kill 150 others, if he just wanted to kill himself?