The men who fell to earth: the tragedy of Sheen’s stowaways

Early one Sunday in 2012 a man fell out of the sky over Sheen, an affluent suburb of south-west London, and landed in the middle of a quiet residential road. ‘I heard a monstrous bang. I thought someone had been hit by a car,’ one resident told a local newspaper. ‘Two fellows going to church said there’s a dead body in the street.’

The man was José Matada, a 27-year-old from Mozambique, although it would take several months for the police to discover his identity. Matada had a small sum of cash in his pocket and a mobile phone. The only message the police were able to extract from it was a single text: ‘I need a favour.’

Matada’s was not the first body to fall on Sheen, which lies directly underneath the Heathrow flight path. In 1996, Vijay Saini, a 19-year-old who had stowed away on a British Airways flight from Delhi, fell several thousand feet on to the site of a partially constructed supermarket. Two years later, another person fell at the same site. Customers in the Marlborough, a nearby pub, swore they had seen someone fall from a plane, although police were never able to find the body.

In 2015 the body of another stowaway, Mozambican Carlito Vale, believed to be 29, was found on the roof of a nearby office block and in 2001, a 21-year-old Pakistani man named Mohammad Ayaz fell on to a DIY store just across the road. Just before Christmas 2021, the body of a teenager was found on railway tracks in Sheen and it is believed that he too had fallen from a plane. An inquest at West London Coroner’s Court has recently concluded, having heard that UK police made ‘sterling efforts’ to find the boy’s family, without success.