24-year-old John Kennedy dos Santos Gurjao sank his teeth into a passenger, then lay screaming and shaking before being pronounced dead at Cork airport, where the Aer Lingus flight diverted.The 24-year-old Brazilian was on the plane from the Portuguese capital of Lisbon to Dublin on Sunday evening when the incident unfolded just after 5pm.
Packages were reportedly recovered from the body and sent for analysis after the postmortem.
A Portuguese woman in her 40s, thought to have been sat next to him, was arrested after 4l pounds of white powder believed to be amphetamine was allegedly found in her luggage.
The pilot told ground control of a passenger “running amok”, adding: “He’s extremely violent.”
Police interviewed passengers before they were transferred to Dublin. Aer Lingus described the incident as a “medical emergency”.
He was restrained by crew after becoming "extremely violent" but then reported to not have a pulse, with a postmortem confirming John had ingested 0.8kg of suspected cocaine.
The drugs were believed to have been wrapped in 80 pellets, but one burst after he had become ill midair.
Cocaine in that quantity has a street value of £40,000.
Shocked passenger John Leonard, of Cork, told the Irish Mirror: "The noise he was making was like something I have never heard before.
"Not screaming in a sense you know if you’d hurt yourself or something, just a very guttural, from deep within him."
This young guy died a painful and violent death. When cocaine bursts in the human body, you have just minutes to live. Please, say no to drugs.
