Airplane Passenger Whose Overwhelming Body Odor Led To Emergency Landing Later Dies Of Flesh-Eating Infection

The man who was reported earlier this month to have forced a Transavia flight to make an emergency landing due to his “unbearable” body odor has died from a flesh-eating infection, according to a new report from Fox News.

As reported by the Inquisitr early this month, the original incident happened on May 29, when a male passenger allegedly smelled so bad that passengers on a Transavia flight from Gran Canaria in Spain to Amsterdam began to faint and vomit. Accounts from passengers suggested that the man smelled “unbearable,” as if he “hadn’t washed in weeks,” with attempts to remove the odor by spraying perfume cans proving to be futile.

Ultimately, the man was removed from the flight for “medical reasons” after the plane made an emergency landing in the Southern Portugal city of Faro. At the time of the original reports on the incident, Transavia officials did not disclose the exact medical condition the allegedly foul-smelling passenger was suffering from, or if it was related to his body odor.

With close to a month having passed since the incident, Fox News offered more details on the passenger, who had since been identified as 58-year-old Russian rock musician Andrey Suchilin. Citing a report from Dutch publication De Telegraaf, Fox News wrote that Suchilin died from tissue necrosis, a flesh-eating infection that he supposedly caught in Gran Canaria. His condition was allegedly diagnosed at first as an “ordinary beach infection,” and while he was given antibiotics, he progressively got sicker on the flight back to Amsterdam.

A Facebook post from Suchilin shared shortly after the incident was quoted by RT, as the art-rock guitarist lamented how embarrassed he felt for disgusting his fellow passengers through no fault of his.

“The tragic and comic component of this whole situation is that I caught a disease, which (let’s not say how and why) makes a person quite stinky. As a result, a group of passengers may demand the captain for you to be removed from the plane.”

RT added that Suchilin’s tissue necrosis became worse after he was removed from the flight at the Faro airport. According to his girlfriend, Lidia Tikhonovich, Suchilin “rapidly deteriorated” and was placed in intensive care one day after the incident. He then fell into a coma and fought for his life for close to a month, with doctors unable to determine the exact reason why he caught the infection.

As further noted by RT, Suchilin was best known in his home country as one of Russia’s top guitarists, having first gained fame in the early 1980s, and had more recently focused his energies on journalism, sound engineering, and writing music for theater.