Chinese police were puzzling yesterday over the case of two foreigners, presumed to be stowaways, who plunged to their death as an Air France Boeing 777 came in to land at Shanghai’s Pudong international airport.
The two men — both about 30 years old — were seen by residents at Nanhui village as they fell to the ground on Thursday. One crashed through the tiled roof of an old farmhouse and the other landed in a field.
Farmer Xu Ronghua said that one man had landed next to a stove where the family’s lunch was being prepared. His mother-in-law, 80-year-old Ding Xiulin, had just left the house when they heard the crash.
The aircraft was held in Shanghai for a day, finally taking off for its return flight at noon yesterday, while police searched for clues.
Xu said that the two wore coats resembling uniforms, and one held some kind of handset. With all the passengers on the incoming plane accounted for, the suspicion is that they had breached security at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, hiding in the plane’s hold or undercarriage before it took off.
”It sounded unbelievable that stowaways intended to sneak into China from France,” said one passenger on the flight. Several Chinese newspapers also posed the question: ”Were they really stowaways?”
China has a very limited problem with illegal immigration other than from North Korean refugees seeking to escape starvation under the Pyongyang regime.
It was not clear yesterday if the two men were killed as a result of falling from the plane or had already died from a lack of oxygen and extreme cold in the aircraft’s hold.
The stowaways’ identities have not yet been formally established.
A French diplomatic source told Le Monde newspaper that Turkish money and documents had been found on the bodies. – Guardian Unlimited Â