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Police find corpse in pilot's home
July 26, 2005
From: Reuters

POLICE have found a woman's body in the house of a man who is suspected of having deliberately killed himself in a plane crash next to Germany's parliament building in Berlin last week.

Police in the eastern town of Frankfurt an der Oder said they found the corpse, which they suspect is that of the dead pilot's wife, buried under a large pile of coal at his house on the eastern fringe of Berlin. They said an autopsy was needed to confirm the identity of the woman. Police could not yet say what had caused her death. The man's wife has been missing for a week. Police said at the weekend they believed the 39-year-old had probably flown on a suicide mission after being questioned about his wife's disappearance. On Friday evening the man crashed a single-engine light aircraft onto a lawn between the Reichstag and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's office in central Berlin. Officials were quick to rule out any potential terror link. The man had given conflicting statements to investigators when questioned on Thursday about his wife. Berlin police said before taking off on Friday from an airfield in Brandenburg, the state surrounding the German capital, the pilot handed over personal documents and car keys to his 14-year-old son and told him of plans to kill himself. The crash prompted calls by several conservative politicians for rules banning flights over the German capital. Advertisement: