Berlin -
Lufthansa's insurance consortium has set aside 300 million dollars to meet costs connected with the Germanwings crash, a Lufthansa spokesman said in Frankfurt on Tuesday.
The sum is to cover compensation claims by the families of the 150 people who lost their lives in the March 24 crash in the French Alps, the loss of the Airbus A320 and associated personnel costs, he said.
The insurance consortium is led by Munich-based Allianz, Europe's biggest insurance group. Allianz declined comment.
French prosecutors said last week that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately slammed the jet into a mountain after locking his captain out of the cockpit. Germanwings is Lufthansa's budget subsidiary.
German prosecutors say the man had been in treatment with psychiatrists and neurologists and had failed to use doctor's sick notes releasing him from work during the period leading up to the crash.
BEA, the French investigative agency that is examining the safety failures that led to the crash, said on Tuesday they were focusing on the cockpit locking procedure and psychological screenings.
The BEA is attempting to reconstruct the history of the flight from the cockpit voice recorder, one of the two black boxes found so far. The contents of a second black box, the flight data recorder, are still being sought at the site of the wreckage.
“The safety investigation will be oriented towards the cockpit door locking system logic and cockpit access and exit procedures, as well as the criteria and procedures applied to detect specific psychological profiles,” the BEA said in a statement.
Lufthansa chief Carsten Spohr said via a spokeswoman that he would visit a centre that's been established for families of the victims on Wednesday.
The centre, in the southern French city of Marseille, was set up to help families travel near the crash site.
Sapa-dpa