Digital Journal reported Monday on the tale of a 24-year-old Brazilian man who “ran amok” on an Aer Lingus flight, traveling from Lisbon in Portugal to Dublin in Ireland. The flight had to be diverted to Cork when the man attacked a fellow passenger, biting him, and then had convulsions on the floor and died after being restrained.
After running the post-mortem examination Monday evening, the gardai (Irish police) have said in a statement that they found around £43,000 ($66,600) worth of cocaine in capsules in the young man’s stomach. The capsules had reportedly ruptured, causing the convulsions and violent death.
When the reports appeared in the media Monday about the incident on the Aer Lingus flight, much speculation was bandied around, with people mentioning zombies, vampires and rabies. Some theorized it might have been caused by the dangerous “bath salts” drug, but now it has been revealed the cause was cocaine.
According to the Independent, talk of drugs came to light initially when a Portuguese woman, holding an Angolan passport, was arrested at Cork airport after she was found to be in possession of two kilos of a “powdered substance.” While initially officials are saying it may be amphetamine, tests are still being run to establish exactly what the powdered substance is.
As reported by the Irish Times, it is believed that the 44-year-old Portuguese woman was accompanying the Brazilian man, who has since been named as John Kennedy dos Santos Gurjao.
John Leonard, a fellow passenger on the Aer Lingus flight, told the media about the experience and how shocking it was. He went on to describe the death of dos Santos Gurjao and said the man started to act strangely approximately an hour after take-off, biting his fellow passenger. Leonard described the incident as “horrible” and that the man suffered an extremely violent end.
Leonard also described how a doctor and two nurses on the plane attempted to resuscitate dos Santos Gurjao without success and that the man’s seizure got far worse up until the moment he died.
“It was like deep anguish is the best way I could describe it – very troubled.”
“Not screaming in a sense you know if you’d hurt yourself or something, just very guttural, from deep within him.”
According to the Daily Mail, Leonard did commend the other 167 passengers on the flight saying they remained “extraordinarily calm” during the violent incident.
