A flight attendant from Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) who was on a layover in Toronto for a trip from Islamabad went missing last Friday after failing to connect with the rest of his crew for the flight home.
Calculations show that this is the eighth PIA crew member to mysteriously disappear during an overseas layover in as many years. Crew members go missing most frequently in Toronto.
The flight attendant, who the airline has identified as Ijaz Shah, landed in the Canadian city on Friday after serving on PIA flight PK781 from Islamabad. Shah was supposed to take a flight back to Pakistan on Sunday, but he did not show up for the bus ride there.
Shah was reported missing, and the Canada Border Services Agency is currently looking into the flight attendant’s absence.
Foreign flight attendants have been known to “abscond” from their airline to look for a better life in a destination country. The last known disappearance of a PIA flight attendant occurred in February 2021 after they worked for a flight out of Lahore.
In July 2020, a flight attendant from the same airline was reportedly reported missing in Toronto, and in 2018, a fourth member of the PIA crew requested refuge in Canada after working for a flight.
In Paris in 2019, the fifth crew member disappeared without a trace. Before escaping to Belgium, the flight attendant allegedly left a handwritten resignation note in her hotel room.
Following the incident from the previous year, a PIA official announced that the airline will begin confiscating staff members’ passports upon their arrival in Toronto to make the process of escaping a little more difficult.