Jakarta.
Mario Steven Ambarita, 22, who crawled into the wheel well of a Jakarta-bound
Garuda Indonesia flight from Sumatra last week has been released and will not
face jail.
“Mario was
released on Tuesday around 11 p.m. at Sultan Syarif Kasim II airport in
Pekanbaru,” Marangin Parlindungan Sinaga, who represents Mario, told the
state-run Antara news agency in Pekanbaru on Wednesday.
Officials
had decided the offense did not warrant further police time, Maringin said.
“Mario
would be in jail if the penalty was going to be more than five years,” he said.
Mario is
from Rokan Hilir district in Riau. On April 8, he slipped past airport security
and climbed aboard the Boeing 737-800 before it departed from the province,
surviving freezing temperatures as the plane flew some 34,000 feet above the
earth surface.
Mario was
found dazed and staggering by Soekarno-Hatta staff and was directly assessed at
the airport clinic. He was reported to be running out of oxygen with blood
coming from his ears and frostbitten extremities.
Mario told
police he had made the perilous journey to see President Joko Widodo in
Jakarta, police said.
The general
manager of Sultan Syarif Kasim II airport Slamet Samiadji was fired over the
incident.
Surviving
the freezing temperature and very limited oxygen in the well of a commercial
aircraft’s landing gear is unlikely, but not impossible. A 15-year-old American
boy survived for five hours in a wheel well on a flight from California to
Hawaii.
The
security lapse at Pekanbaru airport is the latest evidence that Indonesia has
not have sufficient control to allay safety fears in its fast-growing aviation
sector.
Flights run
by low-cost carrier Lion Air are routinely late or canceled during busy times.
After an Indonesia AirAsia flight crashed into the Java Sea in December,
killing all on board, the Indonesian government revealed the airline did not
have the correct paperwork to fly from Surabaya to Singapore.
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