Swiss Police Makes Arrest Following The First Use Of Controversial Suicide Pod (image-twitter/dylanpage910)

Police in northern Switzerland said on Tuesday that several people have been detained and a criminal case has opened following the use of the controversial Sarco suicide pod to end the life of a woman.

As per the local reports, the Sarco suicide pot for the first time was used on Monday afternoon in a forest close to the German border in the Swiss town of Merishausen.

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The person who died was a 64-year-old American woman.

The Sarco capsule, which has never been used before, is presumably designed to allow a person sitting in a reclining inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person inside the chamber is then expected to fall asleep and die of suffocation in a few minutes.

Switzerland is one of the few countries in the world where assisted suicide is legal, under certain conditions.

The pod is self-operated by a button on the inside, allowing for death without medical supervision. The law firm informed prosecutors in Schaffhausen canton that an “assisted suicide” involving the Sarco had taken place on Monday near a forest cabin. Several people were taken into custody by the police and prosecutors have opened up an investigation on the suspicion of incitement and accessory to suicide.

It was said that Florian Willet, a German scientist was the only person present at the women’s death. He is one of the leading members of the Last Resort, an organization responsible for the capsule, and the Swiss arm of Exit International, a nonprofit organization that lobbies for the legislation of assisted suicide.

However, it is unclear whether Willet was one among those who was arrested, The Guardian reported. He had said that the death had been “peaceful, quick and dignified”. The woman had suffered a range of serious issues in connection with an autoimmune condition, he added.

Nitschke, a medical doctor who had reportedly seen the death via video link in Germany, and following the heart rate reading and oxygen level said that she lost her 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 told De Volkskrant.

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The woman before entering the suicide pod had made a statement to her lawyer that she confirmed it had been her own wish to die and that she had the support of her two sons.

She was also examined by the psychiatrist beforehand who had deemed her to be mentally fit.

What is a pod?

An assisted suicide group based in the Netherlands, Exit International developed the suicide pod. Former Australian physician Philip Nitschke founded the pro-euthanasia organization in 1997. Once the user inside the pod presses the button to start the device’s software, the machine kills the person inside by replacing oxygen with nitrogen gas.