ARND WIEGMANN AFP
A Swiss prosecutor said Thursday he had requested one person be remanded in custody after a 64-year-old US woman took her life inside a controversial suicide capsule in Switzerland this week.
The space-age-looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border.
The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country but assisted dying has been legal for decades.
Police in the northern Schaffhausen canton said Tuesday that several people had been taken into custody and were facing criminal proceedings.
Peter Sticher, Schaffhausen's public prosecutor, confirmed to AFP on Thursday that he had requested the preventative detention of one of those arrested.
A court will need to rule on the issue within 48 hours, Switzerland's Keystone-ATS news agency reported.
Without divulging the identities or total number of people arrested Monday, the prosecutor confirmed that the others had been released from custody.
The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant said one of its photographers had been arrested on-site.
The others arrested were reportedly two lawyers and Florian Willet, the co-president of The Last Resort assisted dying organisation.
The public prosecutor's office had been informed by a law firm on Monday that an assisted suicide had taken place at a forest hut in Merishausen.
Along with police and emergency workers, prosecutors had gone "to the crime scene" and had discovered the "capsule with the lifeless person inside", Sticher said Tuesday.
He told the Blick newspaper that the operators had been warned in writing ahead of time that "if they came to Schaffhausen and used Sarco, they would face criminal consequences".
The Last Resort presented the Sarco pod in Zurich in July, saying they expected it to be used for the first time within months, and saw no legal obstacle to its use in Switzerland.
Willet at the time said Switzerland was "by far the best place" to use the Sarco due to its "wonderful liberal system".
Swiss law generally allows assisted suicide if the person commits the lethal act themselves.
But on the same day the Sarco was used, Switzerland's Interior Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider told lawmakers that the capsule was "not legal".
"Firstly, it does not meet the requirements of product safety law and therefore cannot be placed on the market," she said, adding that the use of nitrogen was also "not compatible with the purpose article of the Chemicals Act".
© Agence France-Presse
