Sometime during late afternoon on Monday, a 64-year-old woman climbed into a futuristic capsule in remote woodland in Switzerland. What happened next could have come from the set of a dystopian sc-fi movie.
Once inside, after being given an access code (valid for 24 hours), the lid silently closed above her and, as she lay on a thin mat similar to a camping mattress, with her head resting on a purple neck cushion, an automated voice proceeded to ask her three questions: ‘Who are you?’, ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Do you know what happens if you press the button?’
Three times the woman – a mother of two from the American midwest – answered correctly. She was then given a final chilling reminder about what would happen if she did press it and that there would be no turning back. ‘If you want to die,’ the voice informed her, ‘press this button.‘
The woman did so without hesitation. Moments later the sealed chamber was flooded with nitrogen, starving her of oxygen.
Within two minutes she had lost consciousness and within five – at 4.01pm – she was pronounced dead, a process which was apparently ‘peaceful and painless’.
The woman, who suffered from a severe immune disorder that left her in great pain, was the first person to use the ‘suicide capsule’ known as the Sarco (short for sarcophagus).
She has not been identified but shortly before she died, she was pictured with her back to the camera outside the pod, about three miles from the village of Merishausen in the northern canton of Schaffhausen.
The haunting image of the blonde-haired figure wearing a fleecy cream jumper, black trousers and open-toed sandals, was published in a Dutch newspaper.
The inventor of the Sarco, Australian-born Philip Nitschke – nicknamed Dr Death by his many detractors – now lives in the Netherlands where the device was created using a 3D printer for Swiss assisted dying organisation The Last Resort.
The design is intended to resemble that of a spacecraft in order to give those inside the feeling they are travelling to the ‘great beyond’.
Switzerland is one of the few counties where someone can legally end their life provided there is no ‘external assistance’ and those who help them to die do not do so for ‘any self-serving motive’.
The Last Resort has previously insisted no laws were broken.
The moral and legal status of the Sarco has been keenly debated here in Britain where the ‘right to die’ is back on the political agenda.