A rescue helicopter from the French Gendarmerie flies over the French Alps during a rescue operation near to the crash site of an Airbus A320, near Seyne-les-Alpes, March 24, 2015. An Airbus plane operated by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline, en rou (Photo : REUTERS/Robert Pratta)
A German jetliner Flight 9525 en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany, has crashed into the French Alps. All 150 people, including 144 passengers, six crew members and two babies, on board are presumed to be dead.
The liner crashed near the town of Digne in Southern France at around 10:53 a.m. (5:53 a.m. ET). There were 67 passengers from Germany and 45 from Spain, according to the preliminary reports. Two Australians and one person each from the Netherlands, Turkey and Denmark were also reported to be on board. U.K. Foreign Secretary has ruled out the possibility of any British national on the ill fated plane.
Latest report from The New York Times states that the aircraft's data recorder, black-box, has been retrieved from the site, but the crash cause still remains a mystery.
The rescue operations were suspended for the night. The German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier described the crash site as "a picture of horror" as aeroplane's pieces and human remains can be seen for several hundred metres around the site. At the time of filing this report, rescue team could not retrieve any bodies.
The frozen mountainous terrain is making the rescue operations further more difficult. The French officials are joined by the Spanish and German officials for the operations as well as in investigations into the cause of the crash.
A report from CNN states that a high school group of 16 students and two teachers from a German high school, Joseph Koenig Gymnasium, was returning from an exchange program in Spain was also on board.
Meanwhile, U.S. has ruled out the crash as a terrorist activity. "There is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time," said Bernadette Meehan, spokeswoman for the U.S. National Security Council in a statement.
