Staffers at a Moscow airport found a man’s body in the landing gear bay of a plane shortly after it arrived from Italy. A preliminary investigation suggests the body was there four days, and made several flights.
The man was reportedly identified as 22-year old Georgian
national Giorgio Abduladze; identifying documents were found in
his pockets. Investigators believe Abduladze died from the cold
temperatures at a high altitude, as he was wearing only a T-shirt
and shorts.
“Apparently the man died from exposure to cold; we suspect that
he was a stowaway,” a spokesperson for the investigation
said.
Abduladze’s body was discovered on Thursday during a post-landing
inspection of the right landing gear of an Airbus А-330 aircraft
after a night flight from the Italian resort city of Rimini to
Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport.
A thorough search of the landing gear bay was ordered after
droplets of blood were discovered on the machinery.
Russia’s aviation regulator said it would consult with Italian
authorities on how the pre-flight servicing and inspection of the
plane was carried out in Rimini. The aircraft belongs to the
Russian charter airline I Fly.
However, Italy says it's impossible that the man got into the
plane at its airport, suggesting that he may have journeyed on
the aircraft for more than one flight.
“Authorities are currently examining all the circumstances of the
accident, but we are confident that the deceased man could not
get on board the Russian aircraft in our airport,” Rimini's
Federico Fellini International Airport’s director general Claudio
Fiume told RIA Novosti.
To support his point, Fiume stressed that the body was found in
the part of the plane only licensed staff have access to, but
there is no such staff member in the Rimini airport and thus the
aircraft was not checked.
But Russia’s investigation say that autopsy results showed the
young man died at least four days ago. Therefore it can’t be
ruled out that Giorgio Abduladze got on the plane in a third
country as the aircraft was completing a charter flight to
different countries in the past few days.
Cases when people try to escape flight check-in procedures have
not been that rare in recent years. With freezing temperatures as
low as -55C and scarce oxygen in the high-altitude air, such
trips are grueling, often deadly, ordeals for stowaways.
In 2012 a dead man in his mid-twenties was found in west London
after he fell from a Heathrow-bound flight from Angola. Later, he
was identified as a Mozambican trying to illegally get to England
for better life.
In 2010, a teenage boy traveled 300km in a plane’s landing gear after
escaping an orphanage in eastern Siberia. He was exhausted by the
journey, and was taken to hospital upon arrival.
In 2009 the similar case happened in Russia’s Far East.
Filipp Yurchenko, 19, curled up in the wheel well of an A320
plane operated by Vladivostok Avia and was believed to have died
from lack of oxygen and freezing temperatures. Also that year
Atlanta International Airport staffers found a stowaway’s body in
a plane operated by Delta Air Lines that had arrived from Africa.
In January 2007 the body of another man of African origin was
found on a Delta operated plane after it landed at Atlanta's
Hartsfield-Jackson Airport from Senegal. It was later found that
the stowaway had been killed by the wheels of the plane.