Investigation of pensioner found dead on remote moorland leads police to Pakistan

Man had nothing but three train tickets and £130, plus a medicine bottle emblazoned with Arabic writing

The man is believed to have travelled to Saddleworth Moor in Greater Manchester (Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Detectives investigating the mysterious death of a man whose body was discovered on a remote moorland near the site of a 1949 air crash have switched their search 3,000 miles away to Pakistan.

Officers have spent more than two months trying to identify the smartly dressed man who is believed to have travelled from London to the remote Saddleworth Moor in Greater Manchester before he was found dead near the summit of peak called Indian’s Head on 12 December.

He had nothing in his pockets but three train tickets and £130, plus a medicine bottle emblazoned with Arabic writing, containing medicine that cannot be bought in the UK.

One theory being investigated by the police was that he may have been trying to make a pilgrimage back to the scene of a 67-year-old plane crash, which killed 24 people.

Two young boys were among the eight people saved from the wreckage of the British European Airways Douglas DC-3 Dakota when it crashed in August 1949, although one of them later died in a second accident. But the other boy, now a 72-year-old professor, has since contacted the police.

It was then thought the man could be a grandfather, Hugh Toner, who went missing 22 years ago from a hospital in Northern Ireland. Officers contacted Mr Toner’s family and asked them to provide DNA samples.

CCTV showed the man at a train station in London the day before he was found dead

Now officers have launched an international search for clues after discovering that the man had a titanium plate in his leg that was manufactured in Pakistan.

They have narrowed down their search to 140,000 patients in the country who had one of the 10cm titanium plates inserted into their left femurs between 2001 and 2015.

“We were looking at millions of possibilities,” said Detective Sergeant John Coleman, who is leading the investigation for Greater Manchester Police. “But at least now we know this man is one of those patients.”

Officers, who are already being assisted by the National Crime Agency, are now making urgent inquiries with the British consulate and local health authorities in Pakistan in a bid to finally trace the man’s identity.