First Death Using Suicide Pod; Swiss Police Arrests Several (image @SarcoProject)
The Swiss police opened a criminal investigation into the suspected death of a woman in the so-called suicide capsule. Several people were arrested. The suicide capsule, named as Sacro Pod was used for the first time on 23rd September. The capsule was used at a forest close to German border in the Swiss town of Merishuasen. The person who died was a 64-year-old American woman, said media report.
Police in canton of Schaffhausen, in northern Switzerland, confirmed the arrests. The public prosecutors’ office confirmed of opening an investigation into suspected incitement, aiding and abetting of suicide. A spokesperson also said it was investigating if other criminal offences had been committed, reported The Guardian.
Florian Willet, a German scientist, is believed to have been the only person present at the woman’s death. He is one of the leading members of the Last Resort, an organisation responsible for the capsule and the Swiss arm of Exit International, a nonprofit organisation that lobbies for the legalisation of assisted suicide.
It is not clarified yet if Willet was among those arrested in the case.
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Élisabeth Baume-Schneider, Interior Minister of Switzerland, questioned the moral and legal status of the Sarco Pod.
Speaking to Swiss tabloid Blick, Willet said the woman’s death had been “peaceful, quick and dignified”. He said the woman had suffered for many years from a range of serious health problems in connection with an autoimmune condition.
Switzerland is one of the few countries in the world where assisted suicide is legal, and under certain condition.
Philip Nitschke, the inventor of Sacro Pod, who is also an Australian citizen, called the woman’s death “an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss forest”. Taking to his X, he said the capsule had been used to give her “the death she wanted”.
Reportedly, Nitschke, who is also a medical doctor, had seen the woman’s death via video link in Germany, and followed the readings from an oxygen and heart rate monitor attached to her.
Speaking to De Volkskrant, he said she had lost consciousness “within two minutes” and had died after five minutes. “We saw jerky, small twitches of the muscles in her arms, but she was probably already unconscious by then. It looked exactly how we expected it to look”, he said.
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Before stepping into the suicide capsule, the woman had made a statement to a lawyer, Fiona Stewart, one of the directors of the Last Resort, who is married to Nitschke. In the statement she confirmed it had been her own wish to die and that she had the support of her two sons. She also added that she had wanted to die for two years after being diagnosed with a serious condition that caused her severe pain.
Switzerland allows assisted suicide as long as the person takes his or her life with no “external assistance” and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive”, according to a government website.
Sacro Pod, the space-age looking capsule, was first unveiled in 2019. It replaces the oxygen inside it with nitrogen, leading to death caused by hypoxia. It would cost $20 to use.
