BERLIN (Sputnik) — French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday he expects all victims of last week's Germanwings Flight 9525 catastrophe in the French Alps will be identified by the end of this week.
"The French Minister of the Interior has confirmed that possibly by the end of this week at the latest, all victims [of the plane crash] will be identified," the French leader said at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Intergovernmental consultations between France and Germany are currently being held in Berlin.
The Germanwings Airbus A320, en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, crashed into French mountainside on March 24, killing all 144 passengers and 6 crew members on board.
So far, experts have retrieved 600 discrete indentifiable human remains and have isolated 78 distinct DNA strands, including that of Airbus co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, German Bild daily reported on Monday.
Thursday, a French prosecutor asserted that the most plausible explanation of the cause of the crash was that Lubitz locked the pilot out of the cockpit and intentionally crashed the aircraft.
