Duty officer Sander Homan was patrolling the plaza section of Schiphol Airport when the walkie-talkie on his belt beeped. It was a cold and cloudy morning in Amsterdam, the Netherlands but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Things were however about to change dramatically.
“Corpse found in the plane,” said the message on his walkie-talkie’s screen that is now part of a transnational investigation on a stowaway who nearly caused a diplomatic spat between Kenya and Netherlands.
With more than 60 million passengers arriving in Schiphol every year, deaths on planes are not a very strange occurrence. Infact, the airport has its own mortuary and staff who are at work round the clock in order to deal with such cases.
Homan immediately knew what to do. He made a call to the coroner and another one summoning an ambulance. He then made a dash to his patrol car and drove with full headlights and strobe lights to the cargo section of the airport where the incident had been reported from.
A Boeing 747 Cargolux Italia cargo plane originating from Johannesburg, South Africa via Nairobi Kenya had upon routine inspection been found with an unusual cargo on its left rear wheel well sending alarm bells ringing.
Inspections are normal for all cargo aircraft upon landing so that technicians can see if there is anything unusual that will demand maintenance. The technicians walk around the plane with a torch and if they see anything abnormal they inform the airline.
On that morning, the technician who had been assigned the job noticed a man tied up with ropes four metres up into the left rear wheel well. He was dressed in black sneakers, white socks, navy blue trousers and a red jacket. He was not moving at all.
What followed however was a crisis that shook the entire aviation industry in the world. The worst shock waves of this discovery were felt 6,500 kilometres away in Nairobi. Airlines and foreign governments raised serious questions about the security of the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA).
That was on January 22, 2022. The mystery of how a stowaway managed to breach the security of Kenya’s most secure international airport had just begun. For over one year, the identity of the stowaway and whether he indeed boarded the plane from Kenya has never been conclusively established.
Today, after a 20-month painstaking search for the truth both in Kenya and the Netherlands on what happened, sauce.co.ke can for the first time confirm that he was Kenyan by giving an accurate account of who the stowaway was and where he came from.
In the search for the truth, we spoke to dozens of security officials, went through hundreds of investigation documents and after several failed attempts, convinced the stowaway to speak to us through his lawyer in Amsterdam, thousands of kilometres away from where he risked his life.
We have also established what made him decide to risk his life, how he outsmarted Kenyan security plus the laws of life by managing to survive a nine-hour flight at 10 kilometres above the ground. Additionally, we can now tell how attempts by the Dutch government to deport him back to Nairobi failed.
To date, the Netherlands government has refused to give the Kenyan government the full identity of the stowaway. This is because the stowaway immediately applied for asylum saying he “fears persecution” back home and that it is “not plausible” that the Kenyan government would protect him against it.
Infact, true to the stowaway’s fears, the Kenyan government which was embarrassingly caught flat-footed by the whole saga was really interested in knowing how he managed to know how to get into the plane and if he had any help.
In 2017, after over a decade of upgrades and assessments JKIA received a category 1 security classification, permitting direct flights to the US. Since then, there has been a general feeling within the Kenyan government that any security breaches at the airport will make JKIA lose that precious category 1 status.
This is exactly what happened in 2019 when another stowaway who was thought to have boarded a Kenya Airways flight from JKIA fell from the London skies and died on the spot. The Kenyan government put up a spirited fight denying that the man was their citizen until the story fizzled out on its own.
Yet three years after the London saga, JKIA was in the news again when the Schiphol stowaway story broke out in January 2022. This time, however, the stowaway survived and the Dutch security agencies confirmed that he had boarded the plane in Nairobi. For security agencies in Kenya, there was nowhere to hide now.
“For airport security at Nairobi airport, it is of great importance to find out how the stowaway was able to get on board,” Dutch intelligence officials based in Nairobi wrote to their security counterparts in Amsterdam immediately after the story broke out.
“What route did he take to the point where he boarded? And did he have help from third parties?” they asked.
Fearing the security of the stowaway or his family back in Kenya, the Dutch government declined to give his identity to the Kenyan government. The closest they did to assisting the Kenyan government find the answers it wanted was on February 8, 2022 when they handed over a video clip of an anonymized interrogation with the stowaway.
Everything then went silent.
I knew I might die
“It is my client’s explicit wish not to clarify his fear of persecution. He had to leave, that is certain,” lawyer Flipp Schüller told Dutch media after Benedict was granted asylum by a court sitting in the Hague on June 23, 2023. “But that he had to leave is certain.”
According to the court, the fact that Dutch security officials took the stowaway to hospital after his discovery inside the belly of a plane last year without denying him entry to the country was same as accepting him.
While granting Benedict his asylum request, the court argued that the Dutch government – which fought hard against the application – should have returned the stowaway back to Kenya immediately after they found him. They did not.
“With the trip to the hospital, he was actually granted access to the Netherlands,” ruled the court adding that the unconscious stowaway “was, incidentally, unable to indicate that he wished to apply for asylum at that time.”
With that ruling, the stowaway was granted permission to start life in the Netherlands. Things would have however been different had the officials who found him unconscious in the plane handled the emergency differently.
The outcome would have been different had the stowaway not taken precautions when managed to make it to the belly of the cargo liner after travelling from Murang’a to JKIA and having hidden in the dark for eight hours waiting to make a dash to a plane he was following on an internet tracker.
“The first moment I realized I was still alive, was when I woke up and saw nurses around me, asking if I knew where I was,” narrated Benedict through his lawyer.
“ I knew I might die.”
Survival of airplane stowaways is rare. According to the US Federal Aviation Administration, from 1947 to February 2020, 128 people around the world attempted to stowaway. More than 75 percent of them died.
This is not surprising. At every stage of the flight imminent death is all but assured. The stowaway may fall out of the plane as it is taking off, as happened to 14-year-old Keith Sapsford in February 1970, who fell from the wheel well of a Douglas DC-8 travelling from Sydney to Tokyo shortly after takeoff.
If the stowaway survives takeoff, they can be crushed by the landing gear as it retracts into the wheel well. This is how, in July 2011, 23-year-old Cuban stowaway Adonis Guerrero Barrios died above Havana after climbing onto an Airbus A340 bound for Madrid.
And if a stowaway avoids falling to their death during takeoff being crushed, they will probably die shortly after. Within about 25 minutes of takeoff, most passenger planes reach a cruising altitude of 35,000ft feet. The temperature outside the plane is approximately -54C which is cold enough to induce fatal hypothermia.
Additionally, the air pressure at cruising altitude is around four times lower than sea level, which means that a person’s lungs cannot draw sufficient oxygen from the air. This will lead to hypoxia, when the blood is not able to supply enough oxygen to the tissues of the body, which can cause heart attacks and brain death.
If the stowaway somehow survives the journey, they will certainly be unconscious when the plane begins its descent. So when the plane’s landing gear extends on its final approach, usually within five miles of the runway, the stowaway will probably fall from the wheel well to the ground thousands of feet below.
It is not that Benedict did not know all these possibilities when he decided to hitch a ride to Amsterdam in the belly of a cargo liner. He knew very well from YouTube videos and research that he would fall unconscious once the plane took off and there was a possibility of dying.
“I died there or maybe I died on the plane,” he told Dutch police after being rescued.
“I knew it would happen,” he said.
Preparations for a suicide flight
Born to a Christian family on the border between Thika and Muranga in the year 2000, Benedict who asked us not to reveal his second name in order to protect his family, was the second born of three children. He attended Jomo Kenyatta Primary School in Thika before joining Giachuki High School in Gatanga, Murang’a in 2015.
After completing high school in 2019, Benedict like most of the form four leavers at the time registered for a computer packages course. Without money, and having fallen out with his father he was unable to complete the course.
For the next two years he tried to make ends meet through doing odd jobs but life went from bad to worse. By the end of 2021, Benedict had already made a decision to start another life abroad.
Motivated by his high school’s motto “Your decision determines your destiny,” he ran a number of European countries through his mind. UK was the first obvious choice but the story of a stowaway who fell from the landing gear of a KQ plane in 2019 seemed like bad luck.
He settled for the Netherlands. There was however one problem – he had no passport and no money to pay for an air ticket. At this point there was only one way to the promised land -hitching a ride on an airplane. He spent the next one year secretly researching and planning.
Most of the research revolved around past stowaway cases in order to know the dangers involved. He also researched on what to carry on the trip and the exact plane he would hitch a ride on. From his research, he decided that a cargo plane would be the best to hike.
This is because, unlike passenger planes that are boarded at the busy sections of the airport, only authorized personnel are allowed in the cargo areas of the airport. Additionally, Kenya exports a lot of flowers to the Netherlands which means there are dozens of options to choose from in terms of what plane to use.
And so when Benedict arrived by bus on the eastern fence of JKIA which borders the Eastern Bypass on the evening of January 22, 2022, he was ready. In his bag, he had some extra clothing, a voltmeter, earphones, a yellow electric wire, and a mask since he was expecting Covid-19 restrictions to be strict in Amsterdam.
He waited for the sun to set then walked along the airport’s fence looking for a blind spot. He eventually found one after a long walk. He reached into his bag, took out his voltmeter, and tested the fence to see if it had any electric current in it. It had none.
He took one last look to see if anyone was watching him and then jumped to the other side. He landed with his hands on the grass which because of the just concluded rainy season was tall to the level of his waist.
It was pitch dark but he had come too far and too close quit. With the lights at the far end in front of him acting like a compass showing him where he was supposed to go, he walked carefully through the tall grass toward his bull’s eye.
After about half an hour, he met a second gate. Just like the first fence, he got his voltmeter from the bag and checked whether there was an electric current. There was none. He jumped the gate and walked on till he found a third fence.
By now he could see the beginning of the runway. Just one fence was standing between him and his dreams. He looked around and there was no one in sight. He climbed over the fence, jumped to the other side, and ran as fast as he could.
There is no turning back now
Once inside JKIA’s airside he looked around and saw an empty shed. It was a perfect place to hide; away from airport staff yet close enough to the runway. By then it was 11:30pm. A KLM plane was supposed to leave to Amsterdam at any minute. Benedict knew this from the site ‘Flightradar’ which he was using to track planes that night.
For some reason the flight was delayed and did not take off until midnight. This was Benedict’s chance. However just as he was about to make a run from the shed he was hiding into the KLM plane that was waiting for clearance from air traffic control, another plane came from behind shining its headlights. Benedict’s plan was cooked.
He looked again at the ‘Flightradar’ website on his phone and saw there was another cargo plane headed to Amsterdam from Johannesburg, South Africa that had just landed at JKIA. The Cargolux Italia aircraft bearing tail number LX-YCV was going to spend four hours on the ground in Nairobi before departing at 4:16am the next morning.
He set his alarm for 3:am. He was too anxious to sleep so he kept awake for the next four hours fighting mosquitoes and thinking about the life that awaited him in Europe. At exactly 4am, the Cargolux Italia flight made for the runway. It looked exactly the same as it was on ‘Flightradar.’
What was remaining now was waiting for the right time to run for it. Like the KLM plane that he missed four hours earlier, Benedict waited for it to taxi until it reached the edge of the runway then he made a run for it. He ran as fast as he could, avoiding the air currents from its giant engines, and finally made it to the rear landing gears.
Once there, he quickly climbed to the left one, and using the skills he had learnt from YouTube, he made it to a void four metres from the ground where there was enough space to sit. He then got the yellow electric cable from his bag and tied his torso and legs around the plane’s mechanical parts.
He had watched enough YouTube videos to know that if he made it to Amsterdam he would not be conscious and that he was likely going to fall to his death. Shortly after, he heard the engines roar below him. He took out his earphones and plugged them to his ears to shut out the noise. Then he sat and waited.
A few minutes later, he felt the plane moving. First slowly then very fast until the dots marking the runway transformed into a straight white line. After some time speeding on the runway, the plane took off. The bright lights of Nairobi were the last thing that Benedict saw because he blacked out shortly after.
Was I alive?
Flight CV 7156 appeared from the cloudy Amsterdam skies towards the Schiphol Airport like giant bird of prey with its 68 metres wide wings and 70 metres long body punctuated by blue and white colours plus a huge Cargolux logo.
As it descended to runway A9 carrying tones of fresh rose flowers from Kenya in its belly, none of its crew members or security officials in Nairobi and Amsterdam knew the amount of diplomatic drama that its landing was just about to unleash.
Once on the ground, aviation engineers rushed to carry out an inspection on the plane’s exterior to establish if it had any visible damage before unloading could start. It didn’t take long before they realized that there was a huge problem.
Tucked four metres up the left rear wheel well was a man who appeared dead. His head was leaning forward and his body appeared tied to some of the mechanical components of the plane’s landing gear. There was no way he was alive.
Up to that point on January 23, 2023 no stowaway had ever survived a nine-hour flight at 35,000 feet anywhere in the world. Infact at Schiphol the three last stowaways in 2014, 2015 and 2021 all arrived while dead.
Very quickly, the officials at the runway made calls to the Schiphol Airport Security department which in turn made a call to on duty ambulance operator Björn Schuijt at the medical base. He summoned his colleagues and drove at full speed to the cargo section of the airport. There they found about a dozen officials led by duty officer Sander Homan.
Homan had already taken a look up the wheel well and made a quick decision that the stowaway was dead. He disbursed whoever he thought was not needed at the scene in order to give Schuijt’s team space to retrieve the stowaway’s body.
Schuijt shone his flash light up from the ground to the wheel well in order to access the situation before making the climb up to retrieve the stowaway. The man was dressed in black sneakers, white socks, a pair of blue jeans and a black jacket. His feet and torso were tied to the plane’s mechanical components. He also had a mask on which made it difficult for the medic to make a proper assessment.
The man was dead. Schuijt was sure. He could however not make a medical conclusion without carrying out tests. He asked for a heart monitor from his collegues and as he was preparing to go up to test the stowaway, someone on the ground whispered.
“I think he is still moving.”
Those six words immediately turned the recovery into a rescue. Everyone who was supposed to make a call for more help in such situations scrambled for their walkie-talkies. The forensic investigation team and mortuary teams who had been summoned to pick a dead body were no longer needed.
Schiphol was in emergency mode. As the person in charge of security at the airport that morning, Homan placed a call to the firefighting department and the Amsterdam University Hospital to ask for a trauma helicopter. He also asked for a heated ambulance and told the hospital to prepare for a special type of patient.
Things were moving so fast now for the team. Minutes felt like seconds, and every second that passed greatly reduced the chances of saving the stowaway.
“Get the stuff,” Schuijt shouted to his colleagues as he started going up the wheel well.
With him, he carried an oxygen bag, stabilisation medicines and an intravenous drip. A firefighter who had arrived followed closely behind him. After reaching the stowaway, he carefully untied two electrical cords that had been used to secure him to the plane’s mechanical components.
Slowly, Schuijt and the fireman lowered the stowaway to the ground where he was received and placed into a waiting ambulance. Moments later, the man was on the way to Amsterdam University Hospital as those left behind were left asking themselves several questions.
Who was the man? How is it possible that the man was still alive after such a long flight from Kenya? What made him so desperate that he chose this dangerous option? Did he know how to stay out of reach of the retracted landing gear? And what was that yellow electrical cable for?
Some of these questions were answered within hours after international media broke the story although some of them got it initially wrong.
“The man had been hiding for more than 11 hours since the plane departed from Johannesburg, South Africa, according to a spokesperson at Schiphol airport and police. While the individual was not identified, officials said he is believed to be between 16-35 years old,” said CNN.
Once in hospital, the stowaway who was still unconscious was immediately placed into an oxygen tank in order to speed up his recovery as doctors wondered how he managed to survive.
Stowaways in aircraft wheel wells face numerous health risks, many of which are fatal: being mangled when the undercarriage retracts, tinnitus, deafness, hypothermia, hypoxia, frostbite, acidosis and finally falling when the doors of the compartment reopen.
The landing gear compartment is not equipped with heating, pressure or oxygen, which are vital for survival at a high altitude. According to experts, at 18,000 feet (5,500 m), hypoxia causes lightheadedness, weakness, vision impairment and tremors.
By 22,000 feet (6,700 m) the oxygen level in the blood drops and the person will struggle to stay conscious. Above 33,000 feet (10,000 m) their lungs would need artificial pressure to operate normally. The temperature could drop as low as −63 °C (−81 °F) which causes severe hypothermia.
Those stowaways who managed not to be crushed by the retracting undercarriage or killed by the deadly conditions would most likely be unconscious when the compartment door re-opens during the approach and fall several thousand feet to their deaths.
The Cargolux plane flew at over 35,000 feet for nine hours yet the man had survived. His skin showed no visible signs of frostbite. He was 1.75 metres tall but at 55 kilograms, he was visibly malnourished.
By 8 am the next day, the stowaway’s vitals had recovered enough for him to be transferred to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). There he found two armed security agents who were waiting for him. The Dutch government had decided that whoever the stowaway was, he was not going to be allowed entry into the Netherlands without a valid travel document.
The security agents did not waste their time. They immediately asked the stowaway who he was and where he came from.
“Benedict,” he answered.
While speaking with a lot of difficulty, he explained that he was 23 and he came from Kenya. He even explained that he had boarded a flight from the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi two days before but he could not remember what happened after that.
“I died there or maybe I died on the plane,” he said.
“I was hoping for a better life,” he said.
Meanwhile, the news about the stowaway had hit the Kenyan security system like wildfire. Just three years before, in July 2019, a stowaway fell from a Kenya Airways plane from Nairobi as it descended into London.
Despite the fact that the stowaway was found with a Sh20 Kenyan coin in his pockets, and a half-empty water bottle belonging to Fresha, a Kenyan-owned company, the Kenyan government completely denied that he boarded at JKIA.
Investigations by Britain’s UK media house Sky TV even identified the stowaway as Paul Manyasi, a worker at Colnet cleaning company at JKIA.
However, with JKIA’s airport’s category 1 status at stake, the Kenyan government went as far as producing a man with the same name who was supposedly serving a prison sentence. Sky TV was forced to apologise and the matter died down on its own.
However, in the background, so many things were happening. JKIA’s security was upscaled with new perimeter fences while the Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) passed new tough laws aimed at preventing stowaway cases.
One of the new laws said that persons seeking access to restricted areas will have to undergo thorough vetting including background security checks before being issued with the special passes.
“Every operator of an airport serving civil aviation in Kenya shall establish, implement and maintain a written Airport Operator Security Programme that meets the requirements of the National Civil Aviation Security Programme and these Regulations,” said the new laws.
Yet despite all these regulations and new security upgrades, Benedict managed to outsmart them and hiked a plane to the Netherlands. As he lay on a bed fighting for his life at Amsterdam University Hospital, security officials 6,000km away in Nairobi were blaming each other for the embarrassment he had caused.
“I am afraid that if we do not solve this security problem, we will lose that status,” Narok Senator Ledama ole Kina said in Parliament about the possibility of JKIA losing its Category 1 status.
Pressured by the Kenyan government, the Dutch Embassy in Nairobi sent questions to Amsterdam asking not only Benedict’s identity, how he managed to board the Cargolux plane in Nairobi and whether he had any help. They also wanted him flown back to Nairobi.
Fearing a diplomatic spat, the Dutch government caved in.
It decided to return Benedict to Kenya to face the law. They wanted him flown back to Nairobi as soon as he recovered. Their wish however got into headwinds after Dutch lawyer Flip Schüller who had previously worked on such cases got wind of the matter.
By then, Benedict had partially recovered. However upon release from hospital, police immediately arrested him. He was taken to a border detention centre awaiting his deportation papers to be signed. Schuler knew what to do. He immediately noticed that Benedict was never officially refused entry to the Netherlands before he was transported to the hospital in Amsterdam, but was detained upon his return to Schiphol.
“I am appealing against the decision to detain you,” Schuller told Benedict after visiting him at the detention centre while emphasizing that the chances that he will be allowed in Netherlands were slim.
On February 10, about two weeks after Benedict’s arrival, Fuller filed a case at the Aliens Court in Amsterdam asking for orders for his client to be released from detention. He also asked for Benedict to be allowed entry in Netherlands based on the technicalities. He argued that the fact that his client was not prevented entry while at the airport was same as admitting him to Netherlands.
In response, the state argued through its lawyers that it had no choice than to allow Benedict in the country because he required medical assistance but there was an intention to send him back to Kenya since he was an undocumented refugee.
“With the trip to the hospital, he was actually granted access to the Netherlands”, the court ruled adding that the unconscious stowaway “was, incidentally, unable to indicate that he wished to apply for asylum at that time”.
With that, the court ordered the border detention facility to immediately release Benedict. It also ordered the Dutch government to pay him 1,700 Euros (Sh267,000) as compensation for the 17 days he had been detained. He was then driven to an asylum seekers centre as his application was being deliberated.
It would be another 15 months before a decision was made. During that time Benedict worked as a cleaner for two hours a day at the asylum seekers centre. Then in September last year, the medical effects of his trip as a stowaway came full circle.
While working, he suffered an epileptic seizure which sent him to hospital. Tests confirmed that he was suffering from tuberculosis which had caused an inflammation in his brain. He was immediately put on a cocktail of drugs that he was supposed to take every day as he attended a specialized clinic.
Because TB is highly contagious, Benedict could no longer work. He had no source of income and he was in a foreign country not knowing whether he would be given asylum or sent back to Kenya where he was regarded as a criminal to face the law. Whatever problems he had run away from in Kenya had followed him to the Netherlands.
“But everything is better than Kenya,” he told his lawyer during those dark months.
And then, on Sunday, January 29, 2023, at 2:14 p.m exactly a year after Benedict landed half dead in the Netherlands, an email arrived at Schuller’s office. It is a message from the Justice Department.
“Asylum application is granted,” read the message.
“The Kenyan will receive an ‘A status.’ He would receive a temporary passport, can work without a work permit and is entitled to benefits if he cannot find a job. In addition, he is entitled to language and vocational education. And there is no question of family reunification, because he is single.”
