Dead body found in street could have fallen from plane

Police are investigating whether a man found dead on a London street was a stowaway falling from a passing aircraft.

The body was found on top of a car in a residential street in Mortlake on the flight path to nearby Heathrow airport around 8am on Sunday morning.

The man, thought to be in his 30s and of North African descent, had suffered multiple injuries and police believe he may have plunged thousands of feet.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman told the Daily Mail: "We were called to reports of a dead body found in the road. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

"We are still waiting on the postmortem results and an identification. One line of inquiry is that he was a possible stowaway on a plane."

Last month British Airways launched an inquiry after the body of a stowaway was found in the landing gear bay of a British Airways Boeing 747 that had landed at Heathrow from Cape Town, see previous story. It was believed the man could have been someone spotted scaling the fence at the airport the night before.

In November 2010 a teenage stowaway fell thousands of feet from an aeroplane in the US when the landing gear came out on its approach.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012