Germanwings Co-Pilot Searched Web About Suicide and Cockpit Doors, Says Officials

 The co-pilot at the controls of the Germanwings airliner that crashed into the French Alps last week had been searching the Internet in the days immediately before for information about how to commit suicide and the security measures for cockpit doors, prosecutors said Thursday.

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Investigators found an iPad belonging to the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, at his apartment in Düsseldorf that included his browser history from March 16 to March 23, the day before the crash, prosecutors said.

“During this time, the user was searching for medical treatments, as well as informing himself about ways and possibilities of killing himself,” they said in a statement. “On at least one day, the person concerned also spent several minutes looking up search terms about cockpit doors and their safety measures.”

The disclosure came as investigators in France reported finding the second so-called black box from the March 24 crash of the Airbus A320 jetliner, which killed all 150 people aboard.

In the days since French prosecutors first said that Mr. Lubitz appeared to have crashed the plane deliberately, many in Germany have questioned what they say is a rush to judgment. Even as information emerged about Mr. Lubitz’s struggles with depression and vision problems, possibly psychosomatic, commentators and acquaintances argued that the cockpit recording recovered last week was not definitive and that a technical failure could have been to blame.

The fact that Mr. Lubitz had been researching the security measures for the cockpit door seems to indicate that his actions were not only intentional but probably premeditated. French prosecutors say voice recordings and other data from the flight show that Mr. Lubitz, 27, locked the captain out of the cockpit and then set a course into the mountainside.

French officials said Thursday that the cockpit recordings indicated that a speed alarm was deactivated twice, which means it is unlikely Mr. Lubitz was unconscious or otherwise incapacitated during the plane’s descent. They had previously said that his steady breathing could be heard on the recordings.

Gaby Dubbert, a German criminal psychologist and forensic expert who has analyzed 31 murder-suicides and written a book on the subject, said premeditation was often a common thread. “Based on the cases in my study, the majority of murder-suicides are planned, planned well ahead of time,” she said.

Brice Robin, the chief Marseille prosecutor in charge of the investigation, told reporters at a televised news conference that the exterior of the second black box had been burned and buried in rubble, but that “its general state gives us reasonable hope that it can be exploited.”

Mr. Robin also said that “150 distinct DNA profiles” had been isolated by the police crime laboratory from recovered remains, an important step toward positive identification, which is to start next week. “For each identification, the family of the victim thus identified will be immediately informed, whatever their nationality,” Mr. Robin said.