A man suspected to be mentally unstable strayed into the runway of the domestic wing of Nigeria’s main gateway Murtala Mohammed Airport in Lagos and narrowly escaped being crushed by a landing plane, the local Thisday newspaper reported Sunday.
The paper said the unidentified man, who was in tattered clothes, also caused another plane waiting to take off to shut down its engine to prevent him from being sucked into the engine, after he started banging on the plane.
The pilots of both planes later radioed the control tower, which sent security operatives to take the man away. The paper said the incident happened last Tuesday.
It was the latest in a series of airport incursions recorded in Nigeria, and came a few weeks after a stowaway was found dead in the landing gear of an aircraft at the same airport
Among other incidents, a plane landing at the airport in Nigeria’s oil city of Port Harcourt once ran into cows that had strayed onto the runway.
The incursions have been blamed on either a lack of perimeter fencing at the airports or inadequate security.
