Stowaway death of man who died with a single pound in his pocket

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/stowaway-death-jose-matada-british-airways-heathrow

Version 0 of 1.

The tragic death of a stowaway in London, who plunged from a plane, echoes that of José Matada, who died with a single pound in his pocket after hiding in the landing gear of a plane.

Like the as-yet-unnamed man who fell to his death on Thursday, Matada was on a British Airways flight from Africa – in his case Angola – and his body was found close to Heathrow airport.

Matada was discovered on the pavement of Portman Avenue in East Sheen shortly before 7.45am on 9 September 2012, the day after his 27th birthday. He was either dead or at the point of death due to hypothermia and lack of oxygen when he fell from the plane as its undercarriage opened for its descent into Heathrow, an inquest heard.

Despite wearing only light clothes, he appeared to have survived the bulk of the 12-hour trip from the south Atlantic coast of Africa through being young and fit, though low oxygen levels and temperatures of as low as -60C in the unpressurised wheel recess of the Boeing 777 would have left him unconscious.

Matada, known as Youssop, had no identity papers on him and no one had reported him missing. It was only in April 2013 that detectives said they had been able to identify him, after analysis from an Angolan mobile phone sim card found in a pocket. This showed he had been exchanging text messages with an Anglo-Swiss woman for whom he had formerly worked.

The woman said Matada had worked for her family as a housekeeper and gardener when they lived in South Africa in 2010. She correctly described a distinctive tattoo on his left arm, matching that on the body found in west London.

It was many months more before his family was finally traced. In January last year, the BBC reported that his family had come forward and identified themselves to the authorities in Mozambique after reading about his death in a local newspaper.

His older brother, Domingos Matada, said he had last spoken to his brother in June 2012, when he believed he was in South Africa, but could not get through after that. “I called others who knew him there, but they said, ‘he’s disappeared’,” he said. “I didn’t expect him to go to another country, I just thought he’d suddenly appear here one day, or call.”

In November 2014, Matada’s body was exhumed from an unmarked grave in Twickenham and flown home to his family in Mozambique.