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 further 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 the man showed no signs that he was mentally unstable or suicidal.
Schumacher sustained serious head injuries in a skiing accident at Meribel on 29 December 2013 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 houses for €50,000 (£40,000/US$67,000).
Schumacher remains in the Lausanne clinic, but little information has emerged about his condition since it was announced he had come out of a six-month coma in June.
– The Guardian