JEDDAH: Human body parts fell from the sky in the city of Jeddah Sunday, with police saying they could be the remains of a person trapped in an airplane’s wheel bay.
“Police received a telephone call at 2:30 a.m. from a witness reporting the fall of human remains at an intersection in Mushrefa neighborhood” in Jeddah, spokesman Nawaf bin Naser Al-Bouq said in a statement.
Initial indications were that the remains “fell from a plane’s landing gear,” said Bouq, adding that investigations were ongoing.
Police would not say if the body parts have anything to do with the Saudia airplane that made an emergency landing at the airport in Madinah also early Sunday.
The Boeing 767-300ER flight from Mashhad in Iran, carrying 315 passengers, made the emergency landing at dawn Sunday after the pilot reported a malfunctioning rear wheel. Twenty-nine people were injured during the rough landing.
In a desperate attempt to cross borders, some people at poorly monitored airports climb inside the bays holding the landing gear of planes. Most of them freeze to death once the aircraft reach cruising altitude, but some survive.
In 2010, the head of Beirut’s airport security resigned after the death of a man who managed to sneak onto a runway undetected and hide in the wheel bay of a Saudi-bound jet.
The man’s body was found by a maintenance worker in Riyadh who was inspecting the landing gear of the Saudi-owned Nas Air Airbus 320 after it touched down.
