Chancellor to attend Cologne service

The German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, is expected to interrupt his holiday in Mallorca to attend a memorial service in Cologne cathedral for the German victims of Tuesday's Concorde crash, a government spokesman said yesterday.

The news came as the name of another German victim among the dead emerged. Ms Brigitte Kruse (49) was working last Tuesday as a steward on board flight AF-4590, as she had done for 17 years.

But it was only on Thursday that her nationality emerged, bringing the total number of Germans killed in the plane crash to 97.

The total death toll rose one more to 114 yesterday when investigators found a fifth body in the wreckage of the hotel destroyed on impact by the plane.

Yesterday Brigitte Kruse's parents, from Varel in Lower Saxony, told how their daughter's dream job ended in tragedy.

"Every flight worried my wife and I, that's why she always got in touch after each flight," said Walter Kruse (86), "but we accepted her passion for flying, it was her dream job." The Kruse family are now just one more German family making preparations to bring their loved ones home.

The story is slowly retreating from the front pages of German newspapers, but the question of compensation for families is now foremost in the minds of Germans, or at least in the minds of German journalists.

Air France said yesterday that it would pay bereaved families DM42,000 (£17,000) as a first step, to address "their immediate material needs".

This payment would later be supplemented by an additional amount, a spokesman said.

Yesterday the German press began estimating the amount of the total insurance pay-out, with guesses varying wildly, one reaching as high as DM700 million (£280 million).