A barrister nearly lost his leg after he was bitten by a poisonous spider during a flight to South Africa. He has launched legal proceedings against the the spider airline.

Jonathon Hogg, an in-house lawyer at telecommunications company IPC, had taken five months off work to go travelling. On the itinerary was an orangutan sanctuary in Borneo and diving with sharks in South Africa. However he was on a flight from Doha to Cape Town when he felt "a small, sharp pain" in his left leg and saw a spider scampering away across the cabin floor. When his leg started to swell he thought it was deep vein thrombosis and took some painkillers. But a day later, his leg had ballooned, turned black and was "bursting open" with pus.

Hospital doctors told Hogg that he had been bitten by a brown recluse spider and that he would have lost his leg or even died had he arrived at hospital much later. He was rushed into surgery where, instead of turning into spiderman, a large part of his leg was cut away to remove the dead flesh, leaving it resembling "something from a horror film".

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Hogg spent a month in hospital undergoing three operations and a skin graft. Though he is not averse to the spotlight (he moonlights as an Elvis impersonator and has had his face beamed onto a 50ft high billboard in Times Square), it appears that getting in the news for an exploded leg was unintentional, as he is now suing Qatar Airways. His lawyer said that airlines have a responsibility "to protect passengers from dangerous pests by properly fumigating all planes".