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MIGRANT'S PLUNGE
Sunbather narrowly escapes death as jet stowaway falls 3,500ft and lands 3ft from him in his garden
A JET stowaway’s body fell 3,500ft and smashed into a back garden — as the house’s horrified tenant sunbathed 3ft away..
The tragic migrant plunged from the landing gear bay of the Kenya Airways plane over Clapham, South London. The 787 was lowering its wheels for a Heathrow landing.
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The tenant’s friend said: “He was so lucky not to be hit and killed. The impact obliterated the body.”
The sunbather, in his 20s, was dozing in the garden of the terraced house as the body hit with such force it left a crater in the lawn and smashed a path.
His friend, who was inside the house, said: “He didn’t even realise what it was to begin with. He was asleep and then there was a huge impact.
“The body literally landed one metre away from him and was obliterated. My friend was very shaken.
'THE IMPACT WAS HORRIFIC'
“There were a few of us in the house at the time and it was lucky only one of us was in the garden.
“Nobody would have survived being hit. The impact was horrific.”
The sunbather, who rents the £2.3million house in Clapham, South London, with friends, has left London and is staying with his family.
A neighbour said: “I heard a whomp so I went to look out the window. At first I thought it was a tramp asleep. He had all his clothes on and everything.
"I had a closer look. I saw there was blood all over the walls of the garden and his head was not in a good way."
The Clapham resident said a plane spotter who had been following the flight on an app from Clapham Common had seen the body fall, and arrived almost at the same time as the police – who arrived swiftly to put in place a crime scene.
He added: “I spoke to Heathrow and they said this happens once every five years. There was a previous man who was frozen and this one, he was like an ice block.”
The Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi passed over the house just after 3.30pm on Sunday — descending to around 3,500ft and flying at 200mph as it prepared to land at Heathrow.
The landlord’s brother said: “A witness saw an object fall from the plane. He couldn’t see it was a body at that height.”
'OBLITERATED'
The brother said the tenant was “very badly shaken.”
He added: “It was a narrow miss. The garden isn’t very big.
“There was more than a lot of blood. It wasn’t pretty and caused a significant amount of damage.”
The force of the impact was so severe that police were initially unable to tell whether the body was male or female.
One female resident said: "There was an almighty bang. My husband went out into the street where my neighbour was standing on the phone to the police.
"He was really shaken up. He'd been in the garden when it happened and the body must have landed so close to where he was.
"My husband came back in and I asked him what was going on and he said 'haven't you seen the man? The man who fell from the sky?'
"I wondered what he was talking about and went up to see for myself and there in the middle of the lawn was a body of a man."
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It is not known for certain whether the stowaway was dead at the time he fell but he would have had to survive almost nine hours starved of oxygen at temperatures of around -60C.
Police are trying to identify him.
They found a bag, food and water in the landing gear bay.
A source said: “There have been rare cases where stowaways have survived but in the main they lose consciousness because of a lack of oxygen and hypothermia and then they fall when the wheels go down.”
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Desperate migrants
THE unknown stowaway is not the first desperate immigrant to have fallen from a plane while trying to sneak into Britain hiding inside the landing gear bay.
Mozambican Carlito Vale hit an office roof in Richmond, South West London, in June 2015 after plunging from a British Airways jet.
A second man miraculously survived the same 11-hour flight from South Africa in the undercarriage of the plane.
A 20-year-old Romanian man also survived in the undercarriage of a private jet from Vienna to Heathrow in 2010.
It had flown at comparatively low altitude with enough oxygen for him to breathe.
But Turkish stowaway Kikmet Komur, 32, froze to death in the landing gear compartment of a BA jet in July 2013.
He hoped to get from Istanbul to the UK to see his girlfriend.
There are no recorded incidents of anyone hit by a falling body from a plane in the UK.
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