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Indian flight attendant seeking mysterious man who helped her

18:49 07/10/2019

The Indian flight attendant Nidhi Chaphekar, who was made famous in a photo that went around the world after the terrorist attacks on Brussels Airport in 2016, continues to seek the man who she says saved her life following the explosion.

A few rescue workers attended to Chaphekar (pictured left), now 44, following the double bombing, but one man in particular, she says, guided her through the worst hour of her life. While she has found all the others who helped her that day and thanked them personally, the mystery helper she has yet to find.

“He’s the only one I have not been able to identify,” she told the VTM news programme Make Belgium Great Again, “and I want to thank all my rescuers because without them, I would not have survived.”

She thinks that he was an airport worker because he was wearing a white dress shirt and had access to the mobile medical unit. VTM even went in search of the man, who Chaphekar says is somewhere in his 40s, but without luck.

Now they have had a facial composite created based on Chaphekar’s description (pictured right). VTM is asking anyone who thinks they know who the man is to contact them at 0800 113 19 or makebelgiumgreatagain@vtm.be.

“The ideal situation would be if the man or a family member of his responds to this call, or one of the other people he helped that day does,” said Ellen Vanhove of Make Belgium Great Again, a programme dedicated to getting citizens involved in positive initiatives and solving their problems great and small. “We think he could be Flemish because Nidhi says that his English was excellent and that he spoke another language she couldn’t immediately identify. That could be Dutch.”

Written by Lisa Bradshaw