A stowaway man aboard a Kenya Airways airplane from Nairobi to London froze to death and fell off the aircraft landing in the garden of a suburban London house as the plane passed overhead narrowly missing the sunbathing homeowner, neighbours revealed.

Police and airline officials say the man fell from the landing gear of the plane as it approached London’s Heathrow Airport after a nine-hour flight from Nairobi, Kenya.

The Metropolitan Police force confirmed the body of an unidentified man was found in a south London garden on Sunday, and it’s believed he fell from a plane.

He has not yet been identified and his age is also not known as this stage, authorities said.

A bag, water and food were discovered in the plane’s landing-gear compartment.

The corpse of the unnamed man was found in the residential property in Clapham, south London, at around 3.30pm, police said.

Neighbours told today how the resident was enjoying the warm weather in his back garden of their £2.3 million home when the body hit the ground just feet away.

One told MailOnline: ‘I was pottering around in the kitchen yesterday afternoon when there was an almighty bang.

‘At first I thought it was some scaffolding falling down and thought nothing more about it.

‘My husband decided to see what was going on and went upstairs to take a look.

‘He didn’t tell me what had happened at first. He was obviously quite shocked and went out into the street where my neighbour was standing on the phone to the police.

‘He was really shaken up. He’d been in the garden when it happened and the body must have landed so close to where he was.

‘My husband came back in and I asked him what was going on and he said ”haven’t you seen the man? – the man who fell from the sky?”

‘I wondered what he was talking about and went up to see for myself and there in the middle of the lawn was a body of a man.’

Kenya Airways said today that police traced the body to its Nairobi-London flight.

Flight data shows the jet had descended to 3,575ft (over half a mile) as it began preparing to land and was travelling at around 200mph at around 3.36pm yesterday when it passed over Offerton Road.

It left Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at 9.19am local time and arrived at 3.50pm BST.

The garden where the man landed is a short distance from Clapham Common where families were soaking up the sun as Britain was hit by a heatwave over the weekend.

The neighbour added that the stowaway was fully clothed and ‘badly twisted’ when he was discovered in a ‘dent in the grass’.

She told MailOnline: ‘He was fully clothed, wearing jeans and a blue shirt I believe.

‘The body was intact as far as I could see. Whether that was because he was frozen, I don’t know.

‘He looked to be lying facing up but his neck was quite badly twisted. Next to him was a dent in the grass which must have been the point of impact.

‘I made sure none of my boys were looking, Luckily they weren’t really aware of what was going on.

• Courtesy: MailOnline