GENEVA: A 64-year-old US woman took her own life inside a controversial suicide capsule at a Swiss woodland retreat, with police on Tuesday saying several people had been arrested.

The space-age looking Sarco capsule, which fills with nitrogen and causes death by hypoxia, was used on Monday outside a village near the German border.

The portable human-sized pod, self-operated by a button inside, has raised a host of legal and ethical questions in Switzerland. Active euthanasia is banned in the country but assisted dying has been legal for decades.

On the same day it was used, Switzerland’s Interior Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider told lawmakers that the Sarco was “not legal”. Police in the northern Schaffhausen canton said several people had been taken into custody and face criminal proceedings.

The Last Resort, an assisted dying organisation, 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, The Last Resort said the person who died, who was not named, was a 64-year-old woman from the midwestern United States. She “had been suffering for many years from a number of serious problems associated with severe immune compromise”, the statement said.

Published in Dawn, September 25th, 2024