‘He wanted a better life’: the man who fell from a plane in search of a new start – and the brother who retraced his journey 20 years later

Twenty-three years ago this summer, on a bright early June morning in south-west London, a staff member on her way to work at the Richmond branch of Homebase came across the body of a man who had died in the most brutal and traumatic manner.

His body was lying on the tarmac just inside the DIY superstore’s car park, a tangle of broken limbs in black jeans and a black T-shirt. His skull had smashed and his brain matter was splattered distressingly across a parked car.

It was shortly before 7am, and the area was hastily screened off as a possible murder scene. But when Detective Chief Inspector Sue Hill arrived at the car park, she knew instantly what had happened. Richmond is a few miles east of Heathrow airport and sits beneath a constant procession of jets making their final, screaming approach to land, just at the point where they lower their wheels. The man had fallen from a plane.

The detective and her small team soon identified the aircraft in question: a British Airways Boeing 777 that had taken off the night before from Bahrain. The man must have been squeezed into a gap above the tyres, hoping he could somehow hold on and survive the flight. But aircraft wheel bays are unpressurised and at 35,000ft the external temperature is -50C, with very little oxygen. He was certainly unconscious, and very possibly already dead, by the time he was tipped out of the aircraft and fell half a mile to the ground, hitting the tarmac at 120mph.

The dead man was carrying no ID and had only a small scrap of paper in his pocket, on which were scribbled some numbers. His body was broken beyond recognition. “It was harrowing,” Hill said at the time. “I sat in the Homebase car park and thought: ‘This is someone’s son. What a bloody awful way to go.’”

I know that because she said those words to me. In 2001, I was a young feature writer at the Guardian, not long out of my postgrad journalism course and still finding my feet as a reporter. The plane stowaway’s death had been covered briefly in the Evening Standard and my editor had brought a copy of the paper over to my desk. “Let’s see if we can find his family,” he said. I called the Metropolitan police.

This is a story about migration, but not – as is so often the focus today – about the numbers of those attempting it, or the criminals exploiting it, or the legislation designed to discourage it. This is about what happened to one restless young man who itched for something more for himself and his family, and who died trying to reach it. It’s a story of his impatient ambition and the immense family tragedy that devastated those who loved him.

But it is also about what happened next, and about the younger brother who was inspired to live the life the dead man had longed for – made possible by the sacrifices of their other siblings. Ultimately, it led to an immensely moving meeting, two decades on, that neither I nor anyone else involved could have foreseen at the time. Unaccountably, this is a story with a happy ending.

***

By 2001, Hill was a senior detective with more than 20 years’ experience; she had seen plenty of traumatic deaths. But there was something about this case, she told me at the time, that especially moved her. “I’m a mother myself, and you just think, ‘Imagine what he went through,’” she said. “Very sad. Very sad.” She resolved to do everything in her power to find out who the young man was and get him home.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Hill and her team, based in nearby Twickenham, did manage to piece together the man’s identity, thanks to repeated phone calls to British Airways and international police, the interventions of community leaders and the efforts of the family of the dead man, 3,700 miles (6,000km) away in a tiny and desperately poor village in the Swat valley of northern Pakistan.

His name was Muhammad Ayaz and he was 21, the second of six brothers and four sisters born to a farmer in the village of Dadahara, close to the banks of the glacial river that gives this mountain valley its name. After the police had identified him, my then colleague Rory McCarthy, at the time the Guardian’s Pakistan correspondent, travelled to meet his family; he can still recall the brown onions piled by the side of the road in the summer sun, sold for less than a penny a kilo, and the family’s reluctance to speak until the Pakistani photographer accompanying him offered to lead prayers for their son.

Eventually, Gul Deyar, Muhammad’s father, led McCarthy to the newly dug grave at the edge of a small field, ringed by stones and marked by two plain slate slabs. “He was a very strong man, very brave and very good at working,” Gul Deyar said. “He just wanted to earn money for the family so his brothers and sisters could be educated and have a better life. My son was as strong as four men, but he died in search of bread.”

Our story about Muhammad’s life and death was published in G2 on 18 July 2001, under the headline: The man who fell to earth.

I have thought about Muhammad Ayaz occasionally in the years since, when I have read a story about Pakistani migrant labourers in the Gulf states, or heard of another wheel-bay stowaway, of which there have been at least 70 internationally since 2001, several of them falling in the very same area of south-west London. But I never expected to return to this terribly sad story. Then, in February this year, I received an email from an address I didn’t recognise.

“Hello ma’am,” it read. “My name is Khalil Ullah. I’m a younger brother of Muhammad Ayaz, you wrote about his life when he fell to earth from a British Airways 777 and died. I’m here in England for my higher studies. I just want to meet you and thank you that you wrote very well about his life. I want to see the place where he fell.

“Eagerly waiting for your kind response. Thank you. Regards, Khalil.”

Khalil Ullah had been in Dadahara on the day the Guardian visited, but neither he nor Rory McCarthy recall meeting – in Khalil’s case because he was a baby at the time. Now 24, he is a graduate of a university in Islamabad, where he took a five-year degree in physiotherapy, graduating last year. He knew what he wanted to do next: come to the UK.

Having applied for a master’s at Portsmouth University and for a visa, Khalil then booked a flight. His older brother suggested he travel via Manchester, but Khalil said no. He wanted to fly into Heathrow.

* * *

Khalil and i speak on the phone and arrange to meet. First, however, I ask Hill if she would be interested in meeting Khalil. Although she retired in 2011, she is not difficult to track down, and she emails me back immediately from Australia, where she is visiting family members. “Yes, definitely I would. Very spooky you’ve contacted me. Will explain. I remember it well.”

When we eventually speak a few weeks later, she is on a ship off the coast of Sri Lanka, making her way home slowly on a long-anticipated cruise. A day or two before I first emailed, she tells me, she had been talking to her stepdaughter in Australia.

“It’s really weird,” she says down the crackling line. “I said to her: ‘This young lad keeps coming into my head who fell from a plane.’ I said: ‘I’ve dealt with so many cases, but I’ve just been thinking about him. I wonder how his family are.’ Now I’m not at all [spiritual] like that. Not. At. All. But then you sent me an email a couple of days later. How weird is that?”

Later that week I travel to Southampton, where Khalil rents a room and commutes by bus to his Portsmouth classes. It is Ramadan and he is fasting, but as it is chilly we head to a Starbucks. I find a tall, gentle young man, warmly expressive despite his imperfect English, and quick to smile, especially when talking about his family.

Khalil was only one when his brother died, and has no personal memories of him, but it is clear that the pain of Muhammad’s death has reverberated through the family in the decades since. I ask him to tell me his brother’s story – and his own.

“He loved me so much,” he says, beaming. “My mother and my sisters told me that when I was a little kid in bed, he would take me and kiss me a lot. Like, [that was] his love for me. So, when I was growing up and listening to stories from my sisters, I was thinking: ‘I wish he was here with me and giving me this love, like he was giving me in my childhood.’”

They told him, too, how much he looked like his brother – everyone says so in the village, Khalil says. But his parents were nervous of him being too like Muhammad. There had been very little money when the older boy was growing up, and he had been a headstrong and physically powerful teenager, bubbling with ambition, who chafed under the daily constraints of his family’s poverty.

Muhammad loved cricket, and a family legend tells of one occasion when, on being called out, he smashed his bat so hard he broke it. Another time, he repeatedly challenged his uncle to wrestle him to the floor, defying his efforts to flatten him again and again.

Khalil tells me Muhammad talked all the time about coming to the UK and bringing his family after him. In small villages such as his, he explains, those who have relatives abroad are treated with more respect – “people see them in a different way”.

“My brother wanted to take risks. ‘No, no,’ my father always told him, ‘you have to wait and you will get a better life.’ But he wanted a better life in his prime age” – when he was still young.

“He wanted some big achievement in his life, because at the time our family was suffering. He wanted to give some rest to my father and my mother.”

The family borrowed heavily to pay an agent in Islamabad to secure Muhammad a British visa; it never came. So they paid again to find him a labouring role in Dubai, following the same path as tens of thousands of transient Pakistanis before him.

It wasn’t the big break Muhammad expected, however; the pay of 100 dirhams (£21) a month was a quarter of what he had been promised, leaving barely enough to eat, let alone send anything home. Disillusioned, he found his way to Bahrain where his oldest brother, Gul Bahar, was working. Shortly afterwards, Muhammad formed his plan to get to Britain by another route.

***

No one in the family knew anything of the young man’s plans, but after he vanished, his oldest brother saw a Bahraini news report about a man who had fallen from a plane in London. According to Khalil, he just knew it was Muhammad. Without telling his family of his suspicions, Gul Bahar travelled back to Dadahara and found a photograph of his sibling to pass to the local police authorities. It eventually made its way to Hill, who had narrowed her search to Pakistan based on the numbers in the dead man’s pocket. “And the investigations team confirmed that yes, it was Muhammad Ayaz,” says Khalil.

A British Pakistani man travelling in the Swat valley also played a key part, having heard local people talking about the story, and put the family in contact with a community leader in Nottingham, who liaised on their behalf with the Met and embassy officials, raising funds for the family among the East Midlands Pakistani community.

Three weeks after he died, Muhammad’s body was flown to Islamabad in the hold of another British Airways plane, and his father and uncle drove to collect it and bring it home. Midway through the three-hour journey, however, Gul Deyar stopped the car. Unable to believe his strong, forceful son was gone, he had to open the casket. The damage to the body was so severe that he didn’t look at his son’s face, Khalil says, but just seeing one of his hands was enough. “When he saw him with his own eyes, he confirmed: he is my child.”

When they got home, his mother, Shahi Izzat, collapsed with a minor heart attack. In my notebook from the time, which I am amazed to find still stored in a box in the Guardian archive, is my shorthand note of a phone conversation with Hill dated 3 July 2001. “Mother is in a terrible state,” she had said. “Very worried about her health.”

Muhammad’s death was an immense loss, but it did not deter the other siblings. One by one, in the years to come, each brother would leave, find a job, then a better job, and send money home. And gradually, as a result, the family’s fortunes improved and they were able to make the farm more productive. In this, they were far from alone: according to the World Bank, poverty in Pakistan fell by 17% between 2001 and 2008, largely due to migrant remittances sent home by those who had gone elsewhere for work.

The oldest brother, Gul Bahar, would become a police officer in Bahrain; the third brother followed him and joined the army. Another brother emigrated to the US where he gained citizenship and drives an Uber; one of Muhammad’s sisters also moved there with her husband, a cousin of the family. The three remaining sisters also married and are in Pakistan.

For the youngest siblings, continuing in education was at last an option. Khalil’s closest sister, six years older than him, was able to complete her high-school education; the brother immediately above him got a degree in botany – he too has just moved to Bahrain. “My father loved to educate us,” says Khalil. “He was always trying, and he got angry at me when I was not going to school and not going to the prayer house to read the Qur’an.”

Visiting siblings, home for holidays, would press money into Khalil’s hands as the adored baby of the family – he grins at the memory. Eventually, there was enough to send him to board for two years to finish his secondary education. And then, as a keen hiker who loves to climb the snow-covered mountains near his village home, he opted to study physiotherapy in Islamabad.

It was at university that Khalil learned English and so was able to properly read for the first time the printed sheets of paper that had been stored for decades, tucked in a plastic envelope, in the same place as the family jewellery. It was a copy of our G2 article about Muhammad Ayaz, which one of the brothers had found on the internet and printed off many years before.

“We didn’t want some water to destroy something like that. Because the paper has touched our heart. It means a lot to us. That is why we keep the papers in a secret place, in good condition, with the plastic on top. You can imagine what the paper means to us.”

Khalil looked at it repeatedly growing up, he tells me – “like, 100 times. I read it every month, every year, and just imagined my brother.”

***

One blustery monday morning in early July, I meet Khalil at the US embassy in London, where he has been inquiring about a visa to visit his brother and sister who live in Philadelphia. The immigration officer was not encouraging and told him to come back when he finished his master’s, but he is sanguine. He’ll try again.

We sit at an outdoor table not far from the embassy’s elegantly bomb-repellent plaza, and I ask him about the day he flew into London for the first time. He had been in the window seat, he says, transfixed by his first view of England and acutely aware that his brother would have been travelling only a few feet below where he was sitting.

Related: Out of thin air: the mystery of the man who fell from the sky

“I was thinking of him, that I was on the seat and he was on the tyre side – the difference [between us]. I wished he was here and sitting beside me, and we had travelled here together.” When he got off the plane, he stood there for a few minutes, looking around him – “the saddest moment of my life”.

He will complete his master’s course early next year, and may apply for jobs in the UK. Another option is to try to follow his siblings to the US: his mother still lives in Pakistan but has a US green card and is attempting to sponsor him. He likes Britain’s cold, rainy weather, though, and the way people relate to each other. “People in England are so respectful. There is no racism here, which I didn’t find [elsewhere]. Whenever I go to a restaurant or something, the people speak to everyone: ‘Hi, hello.’ It’s so nice. That’s why I’m so happy here.”

You are the happy ending to this sad story, I suggest, and he beams. “I’m the happy ending – yeah! In a movie, when someone’s trying to [achieve] something, he will try for it a lot. Some stories have the saddest end. But in this story, I’m thinking that for my brother and for me, this is the happy ending for us. I achieved what he wanted, I achieved what I wanted and what my family wanted.”

Later, we make our way to Richmond, and in the car park of the now derelict former DIY superstore, on the spot where his brother’s body was found two decades earlier, Khalil finally meets Hill, who surprises herself by instantly becoming emotional and leaping in for a hug.

They talk in an animated huddle (“You know he wouldn’t have suffered, Khalil? He was gone before he hit the ground. You do know that?”), while overhead a long queue of planes roar on their descent, their dangling wheels clearly visible.

What has so moved the police officer, given all the grieving relatives she must have encountered over the years? “Well, it was looking at Khalil, I suppose, and the fact that he’s come to find us and come to meet me. I think that’s really special. I think all the effort that we put in to get your brother home was worth it.

“I do remember making loads and loads of phone calls to BA, and being a pain in the bum to them to say: ‘Please get him home.’ I’m just glad we did.”

“Now I have met you I am satisfied,” says Khalil. “Muhammad Ayaz’s body was in good hands.”

The patch of land where Muhammad is buried in Dadahara is now a peach orchard, Khalil tells her. “It’s just on the side of the garden. So whenever we go to the garden to cut some fruit, we make du’a [say prayers] for him, and read some of the Qur’an. Somebody makes du’a for him in the garden, every time.”

“He got home safe,” she says.

“He’s safe,” says Khalil. “We feel he is safe now.”