A man arrested on suspicion of involvement in the theft and leaking of a medical file on injured ex-Formula One champion Michael Schumacher was found hanged in his cell on Wednesday, prosecutors said.
The man, whose identity was not disclosed, worked as an executive at a Swiss helicopter air rescue company, Rega, which organised the German sportsman’s transport from a French hospital to Switzerland in June, the Zurich prosecutor’s office said in a statement.
The man, arrested on Tuesday and interrogated by police, had denied any wrongdoing. He was being detained in a Zurich police holding cell, the statement said.
He was found hanged when officers came to bring him breakfast before a scheduled hearing before a judge. According to an initial investigation no one else was involved in his hanging, the prosecutor’s office said.
Zurich police told AFP they had spotted no signs the man was mentally unstable or suicidal.
"We are at a loss for words and deeply shocked," Sabine Kehm, a spokeswoman for Schumacher’s family, told AFP in an email.
Schumacher sustained serious head injuries in a skiing accident at Meribel on 29 December and spent more than five months in hospital in the French city of Grenoble before being transferred to Switzerland on 16 June.
The former champion driver, a longtime Swiss resident, was brought by ambulance amid secrecy to a unit of the CHUV hospital in Lausanne.
But word soon got out that some of his medical records had been stolen and that the thief was attempting to sell them to different media for €50,000 (£40,000/US$67,000).
French prosecutors tracked the IP address of the computer used in the theft of the medical records to Zurich-based Rega, the main operator of air ambulances in Switzerland. The company confirmed that it had received a medical file to enable it to provide a medical opinion on the merits of the transfer operation but denied any wrongdoing.
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