Hi, it's Helen here. Over the festive period, we are revisiting some of our favourite episodes of the year. And today, we want to bring you the moving and inspiring story of Khalil Ula, whose brother, Mohammed Ayers, fell from a plane in London 23 years ago. Earlier this year, he and Guardian journalist Esther Adley went to the spot where his brother fell in the car park at the DIY store.
Despite the tragedy at the heart of this story, I found this episode an unexpectedly uplifting listen and I really hope that you do too. In 2001, Esther Adley was a young journalist who'd only recently started working at The Guardian when her editor brought over a cutting from a local newspaper.
It was just a paragraph or two about the body of a man that had been fined by a supermarket worker in the car park of Home Base, which is a sort of DIY superstar in Richmond, quite leafy, quite nice borough in West London.
and the police knew instantly what had happened. This was an airplane stow away who had climbed into the wheel bay of a plane and at the point where the aircraft lured their wheels at Richmond, as they approached Heathrow from the east, he'd fallen out and this is where he'd landed.
Quite quickly, the police managed to establish what flight he had come on, and it was a British Airways flight from Bahrain that had taken off the night before. But initially, there was nothing about the man that would identify him. He had a scrap of paper in his pocket with a few numbers on it. His body was in quite a bad condition, so I don't think there was certainly no possibility of taking a photograph and trying to sort of identify him in that way.
And so it was certainly going to be a bit of a task for them to try and identify the man and find out who he was as well. And my editor at the time said, let's see if we can find the family. The police eventually identified the man as 21-year-old Mohammed Ayaz. Esther, together with a guardian colleague in Lahore, managed to track down his family in a remote village in northern Pakistan.
She wrote up the story of Muhammad's tragic attempt to reach the UK in search of a better life. Occasionally, she would think about him in the 23 years that passed and then, out of the blue, an email appeared in her inbox.
Hello ma'am, my name is Kanigula and I'm a younger brother of Muhammad Ayaz. You wrote about his life when he fall on earth from British Airways 777 in diet. I'm here in England for my higher studies. I just want to meet you and I want to see the place where he fall. Equally waiting for your kind response, thank you kind regards, Alien.
From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in focus, 23 years later, two brothers, a car park and The Guardian journalist who brought a family closure. Esther, what was it like receiving that email from Khalil earlier this year? Well, it suddenly brought back an awful lot of memories.
This was an article that I had written when I was a very young reporter, not very experienced. I hadn't been working at the Guardian very long, but it was one of the pieces that I had really remembered because it was an extraordinary story. So to receive a letter from his younger brother saying that he had read the story, I mean, it was definitely a very powerful moment for me personally. And tell me about meeting him. What was he like?
I spoke to him quite early on by phone and then I went to meet him in Southampton where he lives and I realised quite early on that he was just a lovely guy, really interesting, really nice guy and he just said he just wanted to find out more about his brother's story. What do we know about the life of Khalil's brother, Muhammad Ayaz?
So he was the second of 10 siblings of a onion farmer, a very poor farmer, who lived in a tiny village called Dadahara in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, in really beautiful area in Northern Pakistan, very mountainous. But at that time, certainly very, very poor.
It had been a really difficult existence for them. And Mohammed had grown up as a kind of ambitious, strong-willed young man. That's certainly how his family would describe him. Hot-tempered, maybe. There's a family story that he had broken a bat when he was playing cricket once when he was called. That sort of passionate and kind of strong-willed person.
But he really kind of chafed. He wanted more for the family. He was really desperate to try and find a way to help the family. But also, I think he sort of struggled with the limitations of the family's circumstances. He wanted something big, like some big achievement in his life. Because at the time, our family was suffering. So he wanted to give some rest to my father and my mother and like, you know, to do something for the family.
At that point in Pakistan, and certainly since, it was something that a lot of young men would do, and particularly young men, to try and find work abroad to be able to send some money home to the family. The oldest brother had already left and was working in Bahrain, and many, many Pakistani men had traveled to the huge construction boom that was happening in the Gulf States at that point. And when he was about 20, Muhammad Ayyas tried to get a visa to come to England,
The family had borrowed really heavily to pay an agent to try and do that. That hadn't happened. So they'd paid another agent to try and find him some construction work and initially he'd gone to Dubai on the promise of a good wage that he thought would be enough to send some money home to the family.
And how did that work out? Well, when he got to Dubai, his wages had been much less than he'd been promised. And actually, he was earning, I think, a quarter of what he'd been promised. And it was just not the big break he'd hoped for. There was no money to send home. And he'd phoned the family a few weeks before he died and said, look, I don't know what to do. I can't even feed myself, let alone send you any money.
So he had then gone to Bahrain. And from what I understand, it was really quite soon after that that he had attempted to come to the UK, a matter of a few days. No one in the family knew what he was planning. He hadn't discussed it with anyone. So no one knows exactly why he made that decision. And obviously, we know now he did get on that plane. And ultimately, he fell in the car park of home base in Richmond in West London. Do we know what killed him?
We don't know for sure. It's an incredibly dangerous, deadly thing to do, really. He must have sort of somehow climbed up on the wheels, passed this sort of huge steel mechanism, and found a little place to wedge himself or hide himself.
You can imagine how squeezed and contorted you must have to be as the wheels retract at takeoff. You're just a few feet from the ground and the plane is then roaring across the runway. The wheels will retract and this huge mechanism will fold up into itself. It's extremely cold. There's very, very little oxygen. So he was almost certainly at least unconscious and very likely probably dared when he fell from the plane.
Within a few weeks, the Metropolitan Police had figured out Muhammad's identity, and that must have been such an enormous shock for his family back in Pakistan. How did they react?
Eventually the body was identified and the family managed to, with some assistance, find a way to get it back to Pakistan. And when Muhammad Ayaz's body arrived in Islamabad, they drove to collect it. So when my father take the body from Islamabad airport, in the middle of the road, like he stabbed the car and wanted to see and open the boat and confirm that he is Muhammad Ayaz. Until he doesn't believe.
And he told me that he hadn't wanted to look at his face, because obviously, the body was not in a good condition. But he'd just seen one of the hands, and that was enough to reassure him that, yeah, it was his son. My mother didn't see the body. My sister was telling me that she wanted to take the box and hug the box, because she wanted to see him, but no one opened the box, because the body condition was not too good.
So they carried on to the family home and Hillel told me that his mum had fainted and it maybe that she'd had a minor heart attack. She'd spent a little bit of time in hospital. It was an absolutely devastating loss for her and for the rest of the family.
And did Khalil, so Muhammad Ayaz's younger brother, the guy who contacted you, did he remember any of this or was he too young? He was one at the time, so obviously he doesn't remember Muhammad Ayaz and he doesn't remember the point obviously when his body was returned. What he's been told about his older brother is that
Muhammad just loved him to pieces. He was the baby of the family, the youngest of all the siblings, and his brother was 20 when he was born. So that was the story that he had grown up with about this missing brother that he couldn't remember, but who had just showered him with love as a baby.
My mother was hearing me, he loves you so much. When I was in a little kid in bed, he tracked me and kisses me a lot. He loves me so much. So this is the first thing that touched my heart. I wish he was here with me and gave me his just love. He was giving me and my childhood.
He says that he physically looks really like Muhammad. There's one photograph, there's one sort of headshot of Muhammad that we have, but sort of passport style photo. And you can see there is a bit of a resemblance between them. They've both got quite a round face. He said that physically they were quite similar, quite broad, strong, tall men.
When someone see me and the village, everyone is thinking that he is Mohammed Ayal, like the face, the body structure. Everyone wanted me and hugged me and kissed Mohammed because my face is the same as Mohammed Ayal's. And did he always know how Mohammed had died? How did he discover that fact?
He said to me that it had always been talked about in the family. He said that when he was about 12 or 13, he became aware that the family had in what he called a special place, a piece of paper, which was kept in a plastic folder and kept very precious. And this was a printout of the article that
I had written in 2001 that someone in the family had found and printed out. And even though mostly they didn't speak English, they had kept it all this time. And he said when he was 12 or 13, he'd started to look at that. And only later when he went to university in Pakistan, did he learn enough English to read it? But he said that he'd looked at it repeatedly as he was growing up because it was a sort of tangible link to the brother that everyone talked about, but he couldn't remember.
One day my brother told me and showed me the paper. It looked one of the journalists of England is right about him. And I was so happy that someone has remembered him. Like, I was reading every sentence a lot of time. What she wrote about my brother. So it's very big for our family.
Wow, I bet you as a cub reporter in 2001 could never have dreamt what that feature would have meant to this family, that they would have encased it in plastic and held onto it as his memory. Not at all. I mean, journalists sometimes talk about it being a privilege to do our job, but that is genuinely one of the most powerful and emotional things anyone has ever said to me about my work.
It sort of brings home, I think, the responsibility of every story that we do, that it's not just a few hundred words to go in the paper. It's real people's lives. And I'm so pleased that this young man from a very poor family who could easily have been forgotten, you know, for his family, there was a way that he was memorialized and they felt goodness he was important. You know, he has been remembered. Nobody has forgotten him.
Coming up, did Khalil get what he came for when he followed his brother to England 23 years on? So Esther, Khalil is now in the UK. What did he come here to study?
He is a physiotherapist. That's his training in Pakistan. So he loves hiking because he lives in the mountains. He showed me all these lovely videos of him hiking through sort of waist deep snow. And he's a really physical guy. And so he'd studied physiotherapy and he did a five year course there. And he's now doing a master's at the University of Portsmouth. And I'm guessing that his family's circumstances have changed a lot since Muhammad I has died.
Well, the amazing thing about Khalil's story is that, you know, when he told his father that he wanted to come to England, his dad had a little smile and a little tear in his eye and he said, why England? Why England? He knew why he wanted to come to England. And the reason he wanted to come to England was because he wanted to see where his brother had died. He wanted to find out why his brother had wanted to come here so badly.
And for Khalil, his circumstances were so different purely because he was the youngest of the 10 siblings as opposed to the second oldest. Because in that time, the six brothers had all at different times moved abroad and sent some money home. And gradually, this is something that has happened quite commonly in Pakistan in this period. The family circumstances have got gradually better and better and better. And it meant that for the youngest siblings, there were
all kinds of options that just had not been open to the oldest siblings. And so Khalil had the opportunity to finish his high school education. He then did a five year degree in Islamabad. And as a graduate, and he said he'd worked very hard. He was a very high achieving graduate.
It had been relatively easy for him to just apply for a visa, book a flight and fly into Heathrow. So the irony of those two brothers and the huge difference in those stories, just because of where they were in the birth order of their family, I mean, they're so powerful, isn't it?
He always wanted to come to Yuki. He tried a lot to get a legal design, to come to here and get family back here and live a good life here. But that's what I wanted to complete his wish as well. He didn't success, so I wanted to come to England and see why he wanted to come here. So I choose England from a higher education.
And what do you think it was like for him when he got the visa and then he's actually sitting on the plane and he's flying to England? It was obviously just a hugely emotional thing. His older brother, I think, had suggested at one point, why didn't you fly into Manchester? Maybe it was a cheaper flight or it suited better. But clearly I said, no, he wanted to come into Heathrow. And this word, Heathrow, Heathrow, he'd said it a couple of times to me the first few times we spoke. It had obviously been a word that he had heard throughout his life, Heathrow, Heathrow.
So, flying into Heathrow, the first time he told me this story, he'd been sitting at the window and obviously glued to the scene out the window and just looking everywhere at this sort of strange landscape, very different countryside, obviously. And just imagining his brother, he said that he'd had this very strong sense of himself on his seat and his brother sitting maybe just a few feet below him and the difference in there
experience in coming into Heathrow, just a few feet of air and metal that had made this immense difference to the experience the two men had coming into Britain.
When I was laying in the head row, I was looking underground and I was thinking very even for him. Where he will dive and who the first one who touches his body and who the first one who sees him, like I was thinking like that. So that moment for me was the saddest moment of my life.
So he touches down at he throat nearly 23 years after his brother fell and then he wastes no time in writing to you. Yeah, it was pretty soon after he arrived, he got in touch and said, I want to see where he fell. He wanted to be able to imagine the scene in his mind and kind of have a really tangible sense of where his brother had died. And so we met in London and I took him to Richmond.
And when we turned up, it was just an empty car park and quite a sort of bleak and strange place. It certainly wasn't, I don't think, what Khalil was expecting. You know, it's a parking lot. It's too far away from it, but I can imagine it's the place. And as we were there, planes were flying directly overhead and you could see their wheel carriage coming down just at that spot.
And it's impossible not to put yourself in the position of his brother falling. And it's impossible for me not to imagine how incredibly powerful and emotional that must have been for a colleague. Like, I'm feeling very emotional here. Like, you know, I'm imagining him in front of me. Like, how he fall. Like, I'm imagining all the scene. Like, just like a movie in front of me. You know, it's so emotional.
And do you think it felt like some kind of closure for him visiting the spot? He said to me that he felt that he had come full circle, that this had been his brother's huge ambition to come to Britain and to make a life here, and
through 20 years of ups and downs, of sacrifices by his siblings, of the family kind of improving their circumstance, of his own education, of being able to afford and book a flight. He had finally been able to do it. So the fact that he was there for him really did feel like he had finally lived the dream that Muhammad Ayaz had had all those years before.
And it might sound strange to say that this is a story with a happy ending, given that it's a story that's got a tragedy right at the heart of it, but it does feel like there's a happy ending. Does it feel that way to you? Yeah, Kaleel said to me, he said, I'm the happy ending for this story. He said, you know, there's lots of movies where something like this happens, there's a quest and it ends in a bad way. But in this story, I'm thinking that I'm the happy end for my brother's story.
Look, what the time is now. I'm going to England really easily. And I'm living a good life here. I wish that he was alive and he was with me and see me. I'm in England. And you know, I'm happy here. For my brother and for me, this is the happy ending. Like for us, I achieved what he wanted. I achieved what I wanted. I achieved what my family wanted.
When we were standing in the car park, Khalil told me that the place where Muhammad is buried in the family grounds is nigh and orchard where they grow peaches. And he said that whenever anybody goes out to cut a peach, we'll make du'al for him, which means we'll say a prayer for him and read some of the Quran. So every time somebody goes to the garden to pick fruit, we remember Muhammad Ayaz
So he made it home. That's right. He said he's safe. We feel he's safe now. Esther, thank you so much for sharing this story with us. Thank you.
That was Esther Adley. You can read her incredible account of meeting Kaleel and also her original story about Muhammad Ayaz at TheGuardian.com. We'll put links to both features in the episode notes. Thank you so much to her and to Kaleel, of course, for sharing his story with us. If you enjoyed today's episode, then please do leave us a review because it really helps other people to find us.
Today's episode was produced and sound designed by Eli Block, and it was presented by me, Helen Pitt, the executive producer with Sami Kent. This is The Guardian.
