ANKARA
A 50-year-old Turkish origin woman is among the victims of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps earlier in the day, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Tuesday.
Nearly 150 people, including six cabin crew are feared dead after an Airbus A320 plane flown by the low-budget airline Germanwings went down in southern France.
"According to our initial reports, a 50-year-old woman named Muradiye Lochman, who was denaturalized from Turkish citizenship, lost her life (in the crash)," Cavusoglu said Tuesday evening.
He made the remarks to the press at a gala dinner held for Polish and Turkish businesspeople in Ankara, which was also attended by his Polish counterpart Grzegorz Schetyna.
Cavusoglu said that they found out that the woman, whose Turkish maiden name was Celik, was aboard the crashed plane after they checked the ill-fated flight's passenger list.
"There is also a passenger named Yasmin, but we do not yet have the confirmation whether she is a Turk or not," he added.
A total of 144 passengers and six crew were aboard flight 4U 9525, when the 24-year-old aircraft went down in the French Alps, Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann said.
The aircraft disappeared from radar screens at about 11:00 local time as it headed from the Spanish city of Barcelona to Dusseldorf in Germany, according to aviation officials.
Turkish, German and Spanish nationals were among the passengers, King Felipe VI of Spain said in Paris during a state visit to France.
Earlier, French President Francois Hollande said: "The conditions of the accident suggest that there are no survivors."
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve announced after visiting the crash site that search teams recovered the plane’s black box.
