BERLIN - A fire that ripped through a hotel in the German Alps on Saturday killed at least five people and wounded seven others, while another person was missing, police said.
The fire began early Saturday in the hotel in the southern state of Bavaria with 50 people inside, including 47 employees from the same company who were spending the Pentecost holiday weekend there, a police spokesman told AFP. The cause of the fire was unclear. The hotel is located in Berchtesgaden, a beauty spot near the border with Austria, once the location of Adolf Hitler’s summer home. Moreover, German airline Lufthansa is weighing possible regular spot medical checks for pilots, its chief said on Friday, after one of them deliberately crashed a jet over the French Alps in March, killing 150 on board. “Unannounced checks” could be a “possible means” to ascertain whether pilots were regularly taking anti-depressives, which could provide an indication of potential psychological problems, CEO Carsten Spohr told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
The surprise nature of the tests would be similar to the doping tests conducted in professional sport, the newspaper suggested. Spohr insisted, however, that the airline would have to examine very closely “under which conditions and in what exceptional circumstances doctors might have to be exempted from medical confidentiality obligations.”