Andreas Lubitz browsed gay porn sites before he decided to kill himself and 149 other innocent people over the French Alps on a Germanwings flight. Also, Lubitz was called a tomato. This is considered an anti-gay slur in Germany.
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| Andreas Lubitz browsed gay porn sites before Germanwings murder |
This sheds new light on a seemingly minor detail from early reports: other pilots teased Lubitz by calling him “Tomato Andy” because he worked as a flight attendant before becoming a pilot. According to IBT, this was not merely an insulting reference to the food and beverage duties of a flight attendant; “Tomato” is an anti-gay slur in Germany, “based on the fact that while a tomato is thought to be a vegetable, it is really a fruit.”
The report also says officials discovered a diary in the co-pilot’s Dusseldorf apartment, in which he “wrote of his fears that he would be ‘found out’ and lose his job.” This is evidently a reference to his medical problems, judging by the direct quote from the diary provided by IBT: “I have too much work and I am not able to do my job properly.”
It should be noted that International Business Times appears to be the only English-language source for the information about Lubitz’ web-surfing history, at the time of this writing; other references to the matter all seem to link back to IBT and its source in the Dusseldorf police. As of Monday morning, most other reports seemed confident that Lubitz’ diary had not been found yet. Reports on the co-pilot’s background have been tricky to follow because, outside of major public press conferences from French and German officials, media in the U.S. and Britain are generally relaying translated reports from German publications, which seem to have a variety of different off-the-record sources in various law-enforcement entities.