Swiss police say they have opened a criminal investigation and arrested several people after the suspected death of a woman in a so-called suicide capsule.
According to local reports, the capsule, named the Sarco Pod by its inventor, was used for the first time on Monday afternoon in a forest close to the German border in the Swiss town of Merishausen.
The person who died was reportedly a 64-year-old American woman. Switzerland is one of the few countries in the world where assisted suicide is legal, under certain conditions.
Police in the canton of Schaffhausen, in northern Switzerland, confirmed the arrests, while the public prosecutors’ office confirmed it had opened an investigation into suspected incitement and aiding and abetting of suicide. A spokesperson said it was also investigating whether other criminal offences had been committed.
Switzerland’s interior minister, Élisabeth Baume-Schneider, questioned the moral and legal status of the Sarco Pod, a device that is designed to allow a person inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person is then supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a few minutes.
A German scientist, Florian Willet, is thought 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 unclear whether Willet was among those arrested.
He told the Swiss tabloid Blick her death had been “peaceful, quick and dignified”. The woman had suffered for many years from a range of serious health problems in connection with an autoimmune condition, he added.
The inventor of the Sarco Pod, Philip Nitschke, an Australian citizen, said on X that the woman had had “an idyllic, peaceful death in a Swiss forest”. The capsule had been used to give her “the death she wanted”, he added.
Nitschke, a medical doctor, had reportedly seen the woman’s death via video link in Germany, and followed the readings from an oxygen and heart rate monitor attached to her.
He said he thought 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 told De Volkskrant.
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Before stepping into the Sarco Pod, 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. The woman said she had wanted to die for two years after being diagnosed with a serious condition that caused her severe pain.
Stewart told De Volkskrant that the woman had been examined by a psychiatrist beforehand who had deemed her to be mentally fit.
Swiss law 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.
The Guardian has contacted Last Resort for comment.
