Doctors in India have found $20,000 worth of gold bars in the stomach of a 63-year-old man who complained about vomiting and constipation.
The bizarre discovery was made after the businessman told doctors that he had swallowed a bottle cap after a row with his wife. When they operated, the doctors found gold bars weighing around 400g, equivalent to around $20,000 in monetary value.
“This is the first time I have recovered gold from the stomach of a patient,” said C S Ramachandran, a senior surgeon at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.
“I remember having taken out a bladder stone weighing 1kg from a patient. But finding gold in a patient’s stomach was something unbelievable.”Removing gold from someone’s stomach is not an easy matter, the doctor confessed.
“It was a tedious three-hour-long operation. He is an old patient and we had to be careful. We found 12 gold bars lying in a stack in his stomach.”
The Times of India website reported that the man swallowed the 33 gram bars known as gold biscuits in Singapore in an attempt to smuggle them into India on March 28th. He is said to have taken laxatives to try and force the bars out, but they got stuck in his small intestine.
The Times of London said that last year, another incident in Mumbai led to customs officials arresting a Sri Lankan man with 700g of gold in his rectum: “He was caught when the metal triggered detectors at the airport.”
A unnamed Indian customs official said that smugglers usually hide gold biscuits in the rectum area. “In the last six months, the smuggling of gold has gone up significantly,” the official said.
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