According to a report in newspaper Correio da Manhã (CM), 58-year-old Andrey Suchilin was suffering from an infectious disease which led to organ failure and to his death.
At the end of last month, a Transavia plane that was flying from the Canary Islands to Amsterdam was forced to divert to Faro Airport due to unpleasant, strong odours coming from one of the passengers.
According to the Mirror, fellow passengers said the man smelled “unbearably” bad to the point that some vomited and fainted.
The tabloid’s report claimed the Boeing 737 Transavia flight from Gran Canaria in Spain to Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands “diverted to Faro in Portugal over the stench - after crew tried to quarantine the culprit in a toilet”.
Quoting “distressed” passengers, the piece claimed fellow travellers on the plane said “it seemed like he hadn’t bathed for weeks.”
A picture taken by one of the passengers appears to show medical personnel escorting the man from the airplane into a bus at Faro airport.
It now transpires the Russian rock guitarist was taken to Faro hospital, where it seems he remained admitted until his death.
CM reports Andrey Suchilin was “suffering from tissue necrosis (a condition which causes cell death - and consequent bad odour) following an infection contracted during holidays in the Spanish islands. “While in the Canaries, antibiotics were prescribed to him but, after being left in Faro, on 29 May, his clinical situation deteriorated and he was hospitalised the following day, and went into a coma”. The newspaper claims that during the last month the musician underwent several surgeries but the necrosis failed to be controlled and the origin of the infection was never discovered.
“His organs began to fail and he eventually died on Monday”, CM states. His death has been widely reported by Russian media and confirmed by his girlfriend on Facebook.
Russian international television network RT said the man had addressed the situation on his Facebook page before his death, writing: “The tragic and comic component of this whole situation is that I caught a disease, which (let’s not say how and why) makes a person quite stinky. As a result, a group of passengers may demand the captain for you to be removed from the plane”.
RT goes on to state: “Suchilin was among the pioneers of rock music in the Soviet Union, and was regarded as one of the top guitar players in Russia”.