Questions over safety begin

It is an area of spectacular beauty, the hills and forests near Lake Constance. Today, though, no one could see the beauty, only the horror, as they searched for the victims of last night's crash. Picking their way through the scattered debris were police officers used to the horrors thrown up by the modern world. Yet even they flinched at what they found.

When they were lucky it was a dead body, something that was recognisable as a human being. But today, they could mainly find only body parts: limbs, mangled remains of what until last night were young Russian children looking forward to a holiday in Barcelona.

The wreckage from the two planes is strewn over a massive area, 25 miles long, and the 500 police searching for victims know they have a long task ahead of them. By lunchtime today they had managed to find 15 mangled bodies, as well as shoes and bits of clothing. It will be a long and heartrending task before every victim is identified.

In the town of Owingen the road was sealed off where a massive piece of the Russian plane had crashed down. Nearby a plastic sheet lay across the road. Underneath lay the body of a young child who, as one onlooker put it, had simply fallen from the sky. A few yards away, a man discovered another victim. "It's a woman, dead," he shouted.

The police and the Red Cross covered up the bodies and someone said: "There's no more work for us here."

For many of the locals it seemed little short of a miracle that no one on the ground was killed when the two jets came tumbling down from nearly eight miles high. Alfred Knoedel is a local journalist who watched in stunned amazement as the sky exploded. The next thing he knew the massive wheels from one of the planes' undercarriages came crashing to the ground in the garden next door to him, leaving a huge crater.

A woman in Owingen said: "There was a huge vibration. I shook along with the house. I thought it was a meteorite striking."

Massive aircraft parts were strewn all over the town's golf course. In the old forest nearby huge swathes of woodland were destroyed by burning debris.

A local doctor, Bernhard Spies, also watched it happen. "I knew in my heart that there was nothing we could do," he said. "As I traipsed through wood with the firemen one of the saddest things I saw was a little training shoe, the laces undone, as if the child that had worn it had undone it on the plane to relax."

He did what he could to help, but everyone always knew it was never a rescue operation, just a recovery operation.

No effort is being spared to find every last body, every trace of wreckage. Helicopters spent the day scouring the area with infrared equipment to try and seek out the body parts, while a team of divers searched the depths of Lake Constance.

Sniffer dogs were also being used to search for body parts. They will have their work cut out for them. As one local paper put it: "In the pitch black night, who knows where the dead were strewn about. They could have landed anywhere."