We have all heard the recent news of the Germanwings aeroplane that crashed into the French alps. A tragedy that cost 150 lives and seems more than just senseless. Something like this is incredibly hard to investigate and to draw valid conclusions from. And the French prosecutor Brice Robin has made it even harder.

While it’s entirely possible that Andreas Lubitz did in fact willfully crash a plane full of people into a mountain, there are actually a number of alternative explanations (even without descending into conspiracy theories) for what happened.

There has never been an actually fail-safe system. Things go wrong on a pretty regular basis.

Alas, by talking to the press after only two days, claiming that the cause of this disaster was malice, the prosecutor is acting negligently. Unless there is significantly more evidence pointing to malice than the fact that Lubitz was heard breathing, this is a classic case of jumping to conclusions.

No one is looking at whether the door actually was defective; no one is looking into whether it is actually possible that a confluence of other events could have lead to this outcome. And if there was actually some other cause, which led to an unconcious man hitting the right buttons and resting on them, we’ll never know.

After all, at this point no one is actually looking into anything other than possible medical and psychological reasons for Andreas Lubitz to have intentionally crashed this plane.

Not because these things are unknowable, but because no one will be looking. By making his statement so early on in the investigation, an investigation that most expected to take months or years, prosecutor Robin has preempted any actual investigation.

This is incredibly negligent and should serve as a warning for the future. You never preempt an investigation into a problem; You never proclaim conclusions without solid evidence. And the fact that breathing could be heard is insufficient evidence. Unconscious people still breathe.

So we are now left to hope, that Mr. Robin was actually right and this was a case of intentional malice; because if it was not, then there is a dangerous defect that could potentially cause more accidents and deaths.