THE Jamaican woman who died on a British Airways flight from Kingston to London on Friday night had given Jamaican Immigration a non-existent address and was probably travelling under a false identity, according to police investigating her death.

The name, according to her passport, was Merlene Palmer, 33.

The immigration forms she filled out before boarding BA 4520 at Kingston’s Norman Manley Airport gave her address as 15 Norwood Close, Kingston 8.

However, Superintendent Carl Williams, head of the police Narcotics Division, told the Observer yesterday that when officers went to this address to inform the woman’s family, it did not exist.

Kingston and St Andrew road maps show no Norwood Close, but there is a Norwood Drive and a Norwood Avenue in the Kingston 5 area.

Williams said it was possible, too, that the woman’s passport was false.

Two Mereline Palmers (with the first name spelt slightly different from Merlene) appear in the Kingston telephone directory. When they were phoned yesterday, they reported themselves to be alive and well.

The investigation into the woman’s death is being led by the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary in the western Canadian province of Newfoundland in whose capital, St John’s, the BA plane made an emergency landing after the woman became seriously ill. The flight was more than halfway to London’s Gatwick airport when the incident took place.

Doctors and paramedics who went aboard the plane when it landed could only pronounce the woman dead.

“We have not been able to positively identify this woman,” Acting Sergeant Kenneth Duff of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary’s Major Crimes Unit told the Observer yesterday. “Checks we have made suggest that no such person exists in Jamaica.”

Sergeant Duff said an autopsy had been performed on the woman at a local hospital but refused to divulge the cause of death.

“We are not releasing the results of the autopsy right now as it would jeopardise the investigation,” he said.

He said that the UK’s police headquarters, Scotland Yard in London, was also involved in the investigation.

British Airways could give no further information on the woman’s death or her apparent state when she boarded the flight.

However, a passenger on the plane, who spoke to the Observer on condition of anonymity, said that the woman began to sweat profusely almost as soon as the plane took off and refused to eat and drink for the entire flight.

Police and customs officers say that such behaviour is suspicious as it is common among smugglers who have swallowed drugs.