After bags of cocaine burst in his stomach, a Nigerian drug mule died in Madrid's airport when officials issued an Ebola alert and left him untreated.
On October 18th, customs officers in Terminal 1 of Madrid-Barajas airport noticed a passenger was trembling after collapsing. When medical staff arrived at the scene, they were told the man was Nigerian and had just arrived from Istanbul on a Turkish Airlines plane.
Upon seeing his condition, the medics believed the passenger may have been suffering from Ebola and issued an alert to Spain’s Health Ministry. An emergency team was then called to the airport to determine whether or not the man was infected with the disease, which has claimed more than 4,700 lives in western Africa.
The emergency services team arrived 50 minutes later at the airport. The passenger had been lying on the ground for more than hour, suffering from a cocaine overdose.
In the meantime, no members of the airport medical personnel had touched him for fear of contracting the virus.
Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports that another passenger travelling with the man told customs officials that he had not travelled to Ebola-infected Nigeria and had not come into contact with anyone infected with it.
After examining the man, the specialist team determined he was not suffering from the effects of Ebola, and ordered that he be taken to hospital immediately.
By the time he left the airport, his pulse was weak, he had difficulty breathing and he was unconscious. He died at 18.55, almost two hours after he first collapsed.
While the Nigerian man lay dying on the ground, airport officials activated security procedures that prevented anyone from boarding the airplane he had been on, and cleared the parts of the airport he had been moving through.
