Weeks after a British media aired the story of a man said to be the stowaway who fell from a Kenya Airways plane in London, Cedric Isaac Shivonje has broken his silence for the first time.
Shivonje, whose photos were published by the broadcaster Sky News on November 11, 2019, is very much alive and serving his jail term at an unidentified prison over defilement charges.
Speaking to Daily Nation on Wednesday, November 20, the 25-year-old man said on the day the stowaway fell from the plane, he was in Kawangware where he worked as a teacher.
“I am alive, as you can see,” said the inmate.
According to him, the photos that were published by the broadcaster claiming it had received them from Paul Manyasi’s girlfriend, were his and they were picked from his Facebook account.
The former teacher of English and Science in a private school said he was arrested on August 7, 2019, over a month after the man who nestled in the landing compartment of the aircraft fell.

He stated that since the story was aired by Sky News, he has been psychologically disturbed as it damaged his reputation with fellow inmates referring to him as death and corpse.
“I saw my pictures on TV but the names were not mine... the next day, a prison warden told me the whole story and inmates started calling me death and corpse. I cried a lot,” he said.
Shivonje’s father, Isaac Betti, who had visited his son at the prison for the first time in two years since he was remanded, admitted to having lied to the foreign media to protect his son.
"When the visitors came, they said they wanted to speak to me but I could not tell them my son was in prison. They said that had been working at the airport and if I was aware of that and I said no,” he said.
“ They then told me that my son died after hiding on a UK-bound flight. When they showed me the photos, I told them that my son’s name is Cedric Shivonje Isaac… all this time I knew my son was in remand but I could not reveal to them. I wanted to protect him,” he added.
The journalists are then said to have handed the family KSh 20, 000 before leaving their home and Betti now claims the story has damaged his son’s reputation and needs cleansing.
The new development now deepens the intrigues surrounding the man who stowed away and fell into a London compound.
Sky News reported that it had identified the stowaway as Paul Manyasi who was an employee of Colnet cleaning company based at the airport and that he was a resident of Mukuru kwa Njenga.
The Kenya Airports Authority, however, dismissed the report saying the name Paul Manyasi did not appear in the JKIA staff registry and the airport’s pass biometric register.
Colnet also denied it had an employee named Paul Manyasi.