Advocates for the “suicide capsule” announced on Sunday that they are suspending applications for use of the device until Swiss authorities complete a criminal investigation into the woman’s spontaneous death after its first use.
Florian Willett, the president of Switzerland-based The Last Resort, is in pre-trial detention, according to the group and its Australian affiliate Exit International. Both organizations advocate the right to assisted suicide.
Swiss police arrested Willett and several others after the death of a 64-year-old American woman who became the first person to voluntarily end her life using the device last month, according to the Associated Press. did. The device, known as Sarco, was used on September 23 in a forest in the Schaffhausen region of northern Switzerland, near the German border.
Other people initially detained in connection with the woman’s death have also been released from custody, authorities said.
Suicide advocacy group boasts that American living in Switzerland used Sarco suicide capsule
A “suicide pod” known as “Sarko” seen in Rotterdam, Netherlands, July 8, 2024 (AP)
The woman reportedly suffered from severe immunodeficiency.
Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland, so long as the person takes their own life without “external assistance” and the person assisting the person does not do so for “selfish motives”. There is a law that allows this.
The advocacy group said in a statement on Sunday that as of September 23, 371 people had applied to use Sarco in Switzerland, but the applications were suspended after the first use.
Exit International, whose founder Philip Nischke is based in the Netherlands, developed the device, which was 3D printed and cost more than $1 million to develop.
79-year-old terminally ill Missouri woman traveling to Switzerland for assisted suicide
This photo shows the Sarco suicide capsule during a media event organized by The Last Resort, a Swiss human rights nonprofit focused on assisted suicide, in Zurich on July 17, 2024. ((Photo provided by: ARND WIEGMANN / AFP))
The capsule is designed so that when a person sits in a reclining seat inside the device and presses a button, nitrogen gas is injected into the sealed chamber from a tank below. The person then falls asleep and suffocates to death within minutes.
Exit International said Willett was the only person present at the woman’s death, which the organization described as “peaceful, swift and dignified.”
On the day of the woman’s death, Swiss Health Minister Elisabeth Bohm Schneider told parliament that the use of the device would be illegal.
Australian euthanasia activist Philippe Nitschke speaks with a reporter for The Last Resort, a Swiss human rights non-profit focused on assisted suicide, for the Sarco presentation in Zurich on July 17, 2024. give a speech at a press conference. ((Photo courtesy of ARND WIEGMANN/AFP)(Photo) ARND WIEGMANN/AFP via Getty Images))
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However, Exit International pushed back against Bohm Schneider’s statement, insisting that the group’s lawyers in Switzerland believed the use of the device was legal.
“It was only after Sarco was used that we learned that Ms. Bohm Schneider was addressing this issue,” the advocacy group said in a statement Sunday. “The timing was completely coincidental and was not our intention.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
