Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who reportedly crashed an Airbus en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf into a French Alps mountainside, had received treatment for suicidal tendencies prior to obtaining his commercial pilot’s license.

Dusseldorf prosecutor Ralf Herrenbruck said the co-pilot had been in “psycho-therapeutic treatment with a noted suicide risk over a long period.”

There was no indication that he had exhibited such tendencies over recent months or clues that he would lock Flight 9525’s experienced pilot out of the cockpit to ram the plane carrying another 149 people into the French Alps.

The co-pilot’s colleagues said Lubitz was “obsessed” with the French Alps and knew the area very well.

A police source in Dusseldorf revealed: “We have a team disassembling his computer, and that of his girlfriend, because the information that we received was that he trawled the dark side of the web visiting, among other things, sites containing gay porn, suicide themes and sexual perversions.”

US airline officials have stated that emotionally unstable pilots are a risk and that similar crashes of airliners in the past has been attributed to so-called “pilot’s suicide”.