The Daily Mail in the UK and others are pointing out similarities between an Argentinian movie released in Britain this week (but in Germany last year) and the Germanwings plane crash.
Argentinian film Wild Tales features a mass killer who locks himself in the cockpit of a passenger jet and crashes it in to the ground to murder everyone on board.
In terrifying scenes the fictional passengers panic and one tries to smash his way through a door to get to the controls in chillingly similar circumstances to the ill-fated Germanwings Airbus A320 flight.
The fictional killer invites his enemies on to the flight, including a lover who jilted him and a colleague who was hard on him at work, so he can kill them.
There are some elements here that are of course different. In the film, the pilot has invited enemies on board and that included his ex-girlfriend. The plane is crashed into her parent's home. We do however know that Andreas Lubitz is believed to have had a recently broken relationship. The
Guardian quotes a German newspaper:
Citing police sources, Bild said the investigation was examining whether Lubitz had been suffering from a “personal life crisis”. He is said to have had relationship problems with his girlfriend and to have suffered emotional problems. The local Westerwälder newspaper said Lubitz and his girlfriend had been together for seven years and lived in a flat in Düsseldorf.
Although not his girlfiend's house,
Lubitz knew the area of the crash well and had flying lessons in the area:
A German co-pilot who deliberately flew a passenger airliner into a French mountainside killing 150 people was "obsessed" by the Alps and was well acquainted with the area of the crash, according to people who knew him.
Andreas Lubitz, a gliding enthusiast from the village of Montabaur, north of Frankfurt, took part in at least one class organised by his local flying club in the French Alps' province where he brought down Germanwings Flight 4U9525 earlier this week.
Of course until investigations into Lubitz are complete we will not know for sure if he had seen the film but some of the similarities are compelling. It also brings motives of the distribution company, Sony, in not withholding the release of the movie in the USA and Britain until after the matter has been cleared up. Certainly there are elements of bad taste in the decision not to do so.