Revisited: The man who fell to Earth

重温:坠落地球的人

Today in Focus

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2024-12-27

22 分钟
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Twenty-three years after Mohammed Ayaz fell from the wheel bay of a plane coming in to land at Heathrow, his brother visits the car park where the body was found. Esther Addley reports. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
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  • This is the Guardian.

  • Hi, it's Helen here.

  • Over the festive period, we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes of the year.

  • And today we want to bring you the moving and inspiring story of Khalil Ulla, whose brother Mohammed Ayes fell from a plane in London 23 years ago.

  • Earlier this year, he and Guardian journalist Esther Adley went to the spot where his brother fell in the car park of a di.

  • Despite the tragedy at the heart of this story, I found this episode an unexpectedly uplifting listen and I really hope that you do too.

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  • In 2001, Esther Addley was a young journalist who'd only recently started working at the Guardian when her editor brought over a cutting from a local newspaper.

  • It was just a paragraph or two about the body of a man that had been found by a supermarket worker in the car park of Home Base, which is a sort of DIY superstore in Richmond, a quite leafy, quite nice borough in West London.

  • And the police knew instantly what had happened.

  • This was an airplane stowaway who had climbed into the wheelbay of a plane and at the point where the aircraft lower their wheels at Richmond as they approach Heathrow from the east, he'd fallen out and this is where he had landed.

  • Quite quickly the police managed to establish what flight he had come on.

  • And it was a British Airways flight from Bahrain that had taken off the night before.

  • But initially there was nothing about the man that would identify him.

  • He had a scrap of paper in his pocket with a few numbers on it.

  • His body was in quite a bad condition.