A popular adage says: “If a bird has learnt to fly without perching, the hunter has learnt to shoot without missing.”
This can be used to describe a situation that occurred between a suspected jewellery thief and Indian Police recently.
According to reports, a 25-year-old man snatched a gold chain from an innocent passer-by on a Mumbai street and took to his heels.
When he saw that he was being pursued by policemen, he allegedly swallowed the chain to conceal evidence of his crime.
By the time the police officers caught up with him, the chain was nowhere to be found and he promptly denied any knowledge of the crime levelled against him.
However, convinced that he stole the woman’s gold chain, police authorities took him to a lab where X-ray footage showed that the chain was inside his stomach.
He was then given an enema to help him excrete the chain but this failed to yield any fruit.
Doctors in the Western Indian city of Mumbai then said the suspect should be operated upon in order to retrieve the chain, but police authorities declined with the argument that an operation would be too expensive.
It was at that juncture that someone came with the idea of force-feeding him with bananas.
According to Shankar Dhanavade, a senior inspector with Mumbai Police, “He was fed more than 40 bananas throughout the day.”
He added that: “Eventually the chain was found. We made him wash and disinfect it.”
He is now facing criminal prosecution in a court.