Villagers find body in plane-plunge girl hunt
villAgERS searching for British student Alana Cutland who leapt from a plane over Madagascar last night said they had found a body.
Police said the body had been provisionally identified as 19-year-old Miss Cutland after a 12-day search.
The Cambridge University student horrified the pilot of the four-seater Cessna plane and a fellow passenger by flinging open the door and jumping out at 3,700ft on July 25.
Miss Cutland, who was on a summer internship to study indian Ocean crabs, is believed to have suffered an adverse reaction to anti-malarial drugs or a vaccination. last night Chief Prosper, the head of Anjajavy village 400 miles north of Madagascan capital Antananarivo, told the Mail: ‘We have found Alana. She was lying in a flat area very far away.
‘We are very pleased after nearly two weeks of searching to have found her.
‘Searchers are carrying her back to the village.’ Up to 400 villagers had been trekking barefoot for up to 15 miles a day looking for Miss Cutland after their chief declared that ‘no one should be lost in a strange land’. Chief Prosper said: ‘in our tradition it is very bad to lose a person...We have to help her back to her homeland. it is our tradition to return a deceased person’s body to their parents and this is what we must do.’
Miss Cutland, of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, was spending the summer break on the Anjajavy peninsula. She became paranoid she was performing badly in her research project and, in her confused state, was terrified she would be jailed.
Her parents – who said she had no history of psychosis – grew alarmed at her incoherent ‘mumbling’ phone calls, and persuaded her to cut short her trip. A British teacher staying in the area, Ruth Johnson, offered to chaperone her in the plane Horrified Mrs Johnson, 51, of Banbury, Oxfordshire, clung for two minutes to Miss Cutland’s leg, screaming ‘Come back! Come back!’ after she unbuckled herself and threw herself out of the door.
On Monday, 100 villagers performed a cow sacrifice to ask their god to bless the hunt. Chief Prosper said last night: ‘it worked.’ A formal identification has yet to take place, but a police spokesman told the Mail: ‘She was identified by her hair, clothes and shoes. We have informed the British embassy.’