Air crash alert ‘came too late’

AN AIR traffic controller, who was later killed by a bereaved father, left it too late to warn the pilots involved in the crash which killed the man’s family.

German investigators said in their final report that the 2002 mid-air crash happened after the Swiss-based controller was too slow to notice that the planes were on a collision course.

However, they added that Peter Nielsen, who was stabbed outside his Zurich home earlier this year, was not the only one at fault over the deaths of 71 people in the collision between a Russian charter airline filled with schoolchildren and a cargo plane.