Basically he missed the net by an inch or two and hit the edge

Basically, he missed the net by an inch or two and hit the edge.”The net is the size of a tennis court, so why it didn’t catch him I have no idea Other people had been on it before and it was fine It had been tested. All the safety checks and test weights had been done to judge distances and then this happened.”He was a fantastic guy and had been a member since the start of this academic year. He had done a lot of jumps for charity, was friendly, intelligent and as brave as a bull.”David Aitkenhead, who set up the event, held on disused land by the park, said: “I saw the accident but it is impossible to say what happened He missed the landing by falling short of the net. He didn’t fly far enough and hit the ground.”The extreme sports club, which is not officially linked to Oxford University, has performed stunts for television and films, including a record 700ft bungee jump for the James Bond film Goldeneye.The catapult had been used some 50 times this year.In 1999, Stella Young, 44, fractured her pelvis after being fired from the catapult.. The remaining contestants in this year’s Miss World pageant freshened up and resurfaced in London yesterday to insist the competition had nothing to do with the riots in Nigeria that left 215 people dead.

She likened holding the pageant in Nigeria – where one woman, Amina Lawal, had been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery by an Islamic court – with staging it in Britain during the IRA mainland bombing campaign.At a hastily convened photocall at an airport hotel near Heathrow, Ms Morley accused her critics of treating the contest as a political football.She said: “You can’t say the journalists are responsible for a journalist’s remark It wasn’t a mistake to go to Nigeria. What was a mistake was a journalist making a remark that he shouldn’t have made.”She dismissed as “silly” suggestions that the pageant should be cancelled. She added: “Why should I cancel an event because a journalist makes a remark?” Asked if the organisers bore any responsibility for the violence, she replied: “I think everyone does if they are holding something on a worldwide scale. But if you are asking me, ‘Did we do it?’ the answer is no, we didn’t.

It isn’t the fault of the girls or any of us.”Glenda Jackson, the Labour MP, led the criticism. She said: “The best thing to do after such fratricide and blood-letting is to cancel the whole competition.”The pageant had already been dogged by controversy, with campaigners calling for a boycott because of Amina Lawal’s death sentence. The sentence is likely to be overturned at a future hearing.Calm began to return to Nigeria’s northern city of Kaduna yesterday with shops, schools and banks reopening.The rioting broke out after ThisDay newspaper said the Prophet Mohamed would probably have chosen a wife from the contestants. Christians also attacked Muslims who objected to the contest on moral grounds.