A Nigerian drug mule has died at Madrid airport after cocaine bags inside his body split open, with attending airport staff too fearful to tend to the man thinking that the man was suffering from the effects of Ebola.
At the time the man reports Spain’s El Mundo collapsed in the customs area 90 minutes after arriving on a flight from Istanbul.
Upon hearing that the man was from Nigeria, staff were too afraid to approach him, leaving him in shivers on the airport floor.
Told El Mundo: ‘A civil guard officer initially positioned the man on his side and identified him from personal documents.
‘When it was clear he was a Nigerian, no one dared touch him.
‘Medical staff decided immediately that there was a risk that this could be a case of Ebola.’
It later transpired that the man was suffering the effects of a cocaine overdose after several bags of the drug burst in his stomach. By the time dispatched health emergency crews were dispatched there was little that could be done for the man after they deemed he was not suffering from ebola and was in an urgent need of a stomach pump.
A passenger accompanying the Nigerian later told police that he had flown from Madrid to Istanbul on October 14 and had not been to Nigeria for four years.
Ebola has killed 4,877 people in the past six weeks, almost all of whom were infected with the virus in West Africa.
Commentators on the web have since debated the moral aspects of having had left the man to tend to his own, irrespective of whether he was a drug mule or not.
Said readers: Well, knowing what we are led to believe about Ebola, all we could realistically expect the authorities to have done was to throw a cordon sanitaire around this individual to protect everyone else in the vicinity and simply await the guys with the biological protection suits – however long this then took.
this man could have been innocent and having a seizure or stroke or heart attack. Some people are saying this man deserved it but what if this man had have been you and u had been having a seizure of some sort. Do you think its acceptable that the staff just left u there drugs or no drugs? Truth is people have no empathy these days and today we are all just covering our own backs
Unfortunately for the victim they did the right thing, would YOU honestly go near anyone if you suspected that they may have Ebola without full protection.
