TRAGIC RIDE
Kenya Airways stowaway may have hitched ride on TWO flights before body landed in London garden
THE stowaway whose body fell from a plane over London could have sneaked on board an earlier flight from South Africa to Kenya, cops say.
Police in Nairobi are said to be pursuing a line of inquiry that the as yet unidentified man could have hidden himself in the landing gear of a plane flying from Johannesburg.
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The tragic migrant fell 3,500ft from the landing gear bay of a Kenya Airways plane and landed in the back garden of a house in Clapham, South London as the 787 lowered its wheels for a landing at Heathrow.
A tenant who was sunbathing in the garden at the time was just feet away from where the body landed.
The plane originally started off from the city in South Africa and flew the 3,000 miles to the Kenyan capital, arriving at 7am, local time, on Sunday.
The same aircraft then left Kenya bound for London two hours later, a journey more than 4,000 miles long.
If the man had originally started his journey from Johannesburg it means he would have been on the plane for more than 15 hours before falling to his death.
Charles Owino, of Kenya Police, said: “We need to establish where the lapse was.
"We are looking into the possibility of that happening in South Africa as a line of inquiry.
"There have been cases in the past of stowaways on flights from South Africa to Kenya.”
The Sun revealed earlier this week the cops investigating the incident have sent the man’s fingerprints to Nairobi for analysis.
All CCTV footage covering the plane taken up to 24 hours before its departure is also being reviewed and the Kenyan Airports Authority is interrogating all staff who came into contact with the aircraft.
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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The frozen stowaway was almost certainly an airport worker who used his security clearance to sneak on to the UK-bound flight, according to Kenyan sources.
Investigators at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi were last night understood to have found CCTV footage of the suspected migrant.
But they were struggling to confirm his identity because no passport or documents were found on the rock-solid corpse which nearly killed the sunbather in Clapham.
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