New Delhi: In a chase that sounds like a Hindi movie script, a thief stayed inside a pond for hours in Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur to evade arrest by the Railway Protection Force (RPF) and used a Lotus stem to breathe inside the water.
The ‘most wanted’ inter-state thief, identified as 32-year-old Harvinder Singh, remained in the muddy pond for nearly five hours using a lotus stem to breathe. A Railway police team caught him on April 6 after he allegedly snatched a woman’s purse in an AC coach of a train and tried to flee at the Sihora railway station.
According to officials, the RPF laid a trap to nab the thief, wanted in more than 400 theft and snatching cases across several states, after receiving a tip-off about him. The accused, however, jumped off the train as the soon as the train slowed down and managed to flee. When the RPF team tried to catch hold of him, he jumped into a nearby pond to evade arrest.
The RPF officials tried to trace the accused, but he remained hidden inside the pond for hours, making it difficult for them to locate him due to low-visibility inside the water. As the search continued for hours with no sign of the thief, divers were called in to locate him.
After nearly five hours of extensive search, the divers found the thief inside the pond. Officials were perplexed to find that he remained hidden inside the water for so long.
During questioning, the accused said that he would mainly target women passengers travelling in AC coaches on trains. The accused, a resident of Bijnor in Uttar Pradesh, already has around two dozen cases registered against him across multiple states, including Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh.