Arrests after woman uses Swiss suicide 'pod'

Several people have been arrested in Switzerland after the so-called Sarco 'suicide pod' was used yesterday in the northern Schaffhausen canton.

Police in the northern Schaffhausen canton said the capsule had been used yesterday at a forest hut, after which several people were taken into custody - and are now facing criminal proceedings.

The capsule has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland, where active euthanasia is banned but assisted dying has been legal for decades.

The space-age looking Sarco capsule, first unveiled in 2019, is a portable, human-sized pod which replaces the oxygen inside it with nitrogen, causing death by hypoxia.

It is self-operated by a button on the inside, providing death without medical supervision.

The Last Resort organisation, an assisted dying group, 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.

In a statement to AFP, The Last Resort said that the person who died was a 64-year-old woman from the midwestern United States.

The woman, who was not named, "died using the Sarco device" at approximately 4:01 pm yesterday.

"The public prosecutor's office of the canton of Schaffhausen has opened criminal proceedings against several people for inducement and aiding and abetting suicide... and several people have been placed in police custody," the canton's police force said in a statement.

The public prosecutor's office was informed by a law firm at 4:40 pm yesterday that an assisted suicide had taken place that afternoon "at a forest hut in Merishausen", the statement said.

The police, the forensic emergency service and the public prosecutor's office "went to the crime scene".

The Sarco suicide capsule was secured and the deceased taken away for an autopsy.

"Several people in the Merishausen area were taken into police custody," the statement said.

The 3D-printable capsule cost more than €650,000 to research and develop in the Netherlands over 12 years.

The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said one of its photographers had been arrested by the Schaffhausen police.

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