Prosecutors decided not to press charges against Vladivostok Airport officials Thursday after a young stowaway died in the wheel well of an Airbus jet in August.
Filipp Yurchenko, 19, curled up in the wheel well of an A320 plane operated by Vladivostok Avia and is believed to have died from lack of oxygen and the cold at high altitudes. His body was discovered at Vladivostok Airport on Aug. 9, but investigators believe that he died at least five days earlier, RIA-Novosti reported.
Yurchenko’s body was discovered by technical staff after they saw a hand poking out of the wheel well, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported. The plane had landed after flying from Irkutsk via Khabarovsk.
Kamchatka transportation prosecutors concluded that Yurchenko boarded the plane at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s Yelizovo Airport, where part of the airstrip isn’t fenced off from the passenger area. Civil aviation rules do not require that airport staff check wheel wells, RIA-Novosti reported.
The prosecutors ruled that 15 airport officials should only face disciplinary measures, not civil or criminal charges, for failing to prevent Yurchenko from entering a secure airport zone, spokeswoman Kristina Ilyinskaya said.
“It was decided not to press civil or criminal charges because officials didn’t do anything that was against their rules of employment,” Ilyinskaya told RIA-Novosti.
Prosecutors ordered “the strengthening of control of planes landing at the airport, so that such cases do not happen again,” Ilyinskaya said.
Yurchenko, a resident of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, had no documents, but was identified by his fingerprints as he had once received a suspended sentence for fraud, RIA-Novosti reported.
In 2007, the body of a teenage boy was found near Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport after he fell out of a wheel well in a plane. In the same year, a 15-year-old boy survived after smuggling himself onto a flight from Perm to Moscow, but suffered severe frostbite. In the wake of the cases, Moscow police called for airport security to be improved.
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