Tributes have been paid to the first victims of Germanwings flight 4U9525 to be named as search teams and investigators resumed work at the crash site high in the French Alps.
The largest numbers of those among the 150 dead were 72 German and at least 49 Spanish nationals. The first of the Spanish victims were named by the media on Wednesday morning.
At least three Britons are dead, the foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, said on Wednesday.
In Seyne-les-Alpes, the picturesque alpine mountain village of 1,500 people which has been transformed into a makeshift centre of operations, support staff were preparing on Wednesday to greet the first relatives of the victims. Many families had chosen to fly to Marseille overnight and be bussed up into the alps to get as near as possible to the crash site and to begin grieving as they waited for relatives’ remains.
In the village, the mood was grief and sadness. Looking up at the snow capped mountain beyond which the plane had crashed, Maurice Borel, a retired volunteer fireman, said: “It is going to be very hard indeed for the emergency workers trying to recover the victims’ remains. I feel for everyone, I really do. Nothing like this has ever happened here before.”
Among the Spanish dead were Marina Bandrés López-Belio, a 37-year-old from Huesca, who had been on the flight with her 7-month old baby Julian. She lived in Manchester, but had travelled to Zaragoza for the funeral of a family member. “we are devastated,” her husband, Pawel Pracz, said.
Others named by Spanish media included Carles Milla Masanas, the father of a two-year-old, Joseph Sabaté Casellas, a 38-year-old director for clothing firm Esprit who was expecting his fourth child and Enric Guiot, 60, who travelled once a week between Barcelona and Düsseldorf for business.
The small town of Bonrepòs i Mirambell, near Valencia, has declared two days of mourning after announcing that Pilar Vicente Sebastián, who had spent 25 years teaching in the local school, had been on the flight. Sebastián was headed to Düsseldorf to visit her two children, who are both Erasmus students in Germany.
The west-German town of Haltern is in mourning after 16 students, in grade 10, and two teachers from Joseph-König high school were confirmed to have died. They were on their way home from a Spanish exchange trip.
Passengers came from around the world. In Australia, Carol Friday and her son Greig, were named as victims by the country’s foreign minister and Colombia said María del Pilar Tejada and Luis Eduardo Medrano were two of the dead. Kazakhstan confirmed that three of its citizens - Erbol and Adil Imankulov and Aizhan Isengaliyeva - were killed.
Two Iranian sports journalists - Milad Hojatoleslami and Hussein Javadi - had covered a Real Madrid - FC Barcelona fixture and were on their way to Austria to watch the Iranian national team play Chile.
Barcelona’s opera house, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, on Tuesday confirmed that the singers Oleg Bryjak and Maria Radner, and her husband and baby, had died as the plane crashed.
Two Argentinians, two US citizens, three Mexicans, two Japanese, one Turkish national, one Belgian and one Dutch passenger were also confirmed as being among those killed in what Germanwings described as a “tragic accident”.
Investigators said they were puzzled as to why the crew did not send out a mayday or distress signal as flight 4U9525 rapidly lost altitude for eight minutes, or why the pilot did not change course to avoid crashing into a rocky ravine at around 430mph (700kmh).
France’s interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, told RTL radio on Wednesday that the cockpit voice recorder found on Tuesday had been damaged but could still be used to find information. He said all options must be looked at to explain why the Airbus A320 crashed but a terrorist attack was not the most likely scenario.
In the last 10 minutes of the flight there was total radio silence from the crew of the Barcelona–Düsseldorf flight operated by Lufthansa’s low-cost subsidiary.
Ségolène Royal, a French cabinet minister, said the seconds between 10.30am and 10.31am are considered vital to the investigation into the crash. She said the pilot stopped responding after 10.31am.
The crash happened at around 11am on Tuesday in calm weather. Unverified information from plane-tracking websites appeared to rule out an explosion or a mid-air stall, both of which would cause a much faster descent. Experts said planes such as the Airbus would be able to glide for some distance in the case of total engine failure.
Emergency workers resumed their search for the victims on Wednesday under a blanket of cloud and in freezing temperatures. More than 300 police and 380 firefighters sought to find both bodies and clues amid wreckage spread over a wide area of the southern French Alps near Seyne-les-Alpes.
The French president, François Hollande, his German counterpart, Angela Merkel, and the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, arrived in Seyne-les-Alpes on Wednesday afternoon to pay their respects.
Over 800 beds in the vicinity have been requisitioned for support staff, families and emergency services. Local language teachers had offered to help translate for the families and more than 50 specialists assigned to take care of them.
Nurses and psychological support staff in Seyne-les-Alpes said grief counselling would be particularly difficult because families would not immediately be able to have their loved one’s remains. Families would instead be encouraged to leave remembrance notices in the condolences book describing their loved ones, their memories and the last time they saw them.
A makeshift chapel in the village has been decorated with flowers and flags of the victims’ countries, with chairs, tables and drinks for the relatives.
Such was the high-impact of the crash that is thought it could take days or even a week for the victims’ remains, and the crucial clues from the wreckage, to be retrieved.
Gilbert Sauvan, the president of the general council for the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, described the scene to reporters: “Everything is pulverised,” he said. “The largest pieces of debris are the size of a small car.”
In its latest update, Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, said telephone hotlines had been established for passengers’ relatives. “Everyone at Germanwings and Lufthansa is deeply shocked and saddened by these events,” the statement said. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of the passengers and crew members.”
Amid reports that the plane had been recently grounded owing to safety concerns, a spokesman for Germanwings said there had been a problem with the door for the plane’s landing gear, which was investigated on Monday, but which was not a safety issue.
“It was only a problem with the nose landing gear door, so just the door in front of the nose landing gear and it had to be repaired not for safety reasons but for acoustic reasons,” he said.
He said after the issue was investigated, the plane was passed for flight. “It was cleared to fly again.”