The co-pilot of the Germanwings aircraft began the plane’s descent manually and ‘intentionally’, a Marseille prosecutor has said.
The black box recording suggests that the co-pilot of the crashed Airbus A320 refused to open the cockpit door to the pilot who was trying to get in.
The pilots have been named as captain Patrick S and co-pilot Andreas Lubitz by the prosecutor.
Speaking at a live news conference, Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said that for the first 20 minutes of the flight the captain and the co-pilot spoke to each other in a “normal fashion”.
After examining the recorded audio from the Black Box Mr Robin said: “Then we hear the commander asking the co-pilot to take over.
“Then we hear the sound of a chair being pushed back on the door closing.
“The co-pilot uses the flight monitoring system to start the descent of the plane.
“This action can only be voluntary- it is not automatic. We hear several cries from the other pilot asking to be allowed back in.
“He’s asking through the telephone intercom system. He identifies himself on the intercom but there’s no response from the co-pilot.
“He then knocks on the door and then asks for it to be opened and he has no response from the co-pilot.
“Then we started hearing banging, someone actually trying to break the door down.
“That’s why the alarms were let off, because these protocols that were put in place of any terror attack.
“Again, no distress signal, zero, no ‘help me’ or SOS. Nothing of this sort was received by air traffic control.
“We hear breathing and you can hear this breathing until the moment of impact, so we know the co-pilot was still alive at this point.”
Mr Robin chillingly went on to describe how the black box’s voice recorder revealed that the passengers had no idea what was going on until the final moments before they smashed into the remote mountainside.
Mr Robin continued: “He took this action, for reasons we still don’t know why.
“We can only deduce he destroyed the plane. He voluntarily allowed the plane to lose altitude.
“I think the victims only realised at the last moment because on the recording you only hear the screams on the last moments.”
Both pilots were German, and neither were listed as a terrorist, Mr Robin confirmed.
It is understood that Mr Lubitz was a member of a glider club in Germany, and had obtained his glider pilot’s license as a teenager.
Emergency service workers and witnesses have spoken out of the horrors of the crash site when they arrived yesterday.
One mountain guide told The Independent “It is difficult to say but there are not whole bodies.
“There are only parts and they are small, the size of a laptop computer.
“It is beyond distressing to see what has been done to these fellow human beings.”
The only way determine the identities of many of the dead is through forensic DNA and medical testing, as well as analysis of teeth and dental records.