Caught stealing, man gulps down gold chain

CHENNAI: You’ve got to have the stomach for it if you choose a life of crime.
A robber who went to Government General Hospital expecting easy pickings early Thursday morning found himself on the operating table receiving an unexpected surgery after swallowing a gold chain nicked from a patient’s relative.
A police officer said the public helped two police sub-inspectors chase and catch Kamalakannan, 28, a resident of Triplicane, after he snatched a gold chain from Dhanalakshmi, 40, who was staying in the hospital to take care of her father Kondaiah, 60, from Nasarathpuram in St Thomas Mount.
The sub-inspectors informed doctors at the hospital about Kamalakannan’s situation and they performed an endoscopy on the robber to remove the gold chain from his stomach.
Kondaiah’s family had admitted him to the hospital a couple of days ago after he took ill, the officer said. Early Thursday morning, when his daughter Dhanalakshmi was fast asleep, Kamalakannan entered the ward and snatched her 3-sovereign gold chain and attempted to flee.
“Dhanalakshmi woke up with a start when Kamalakannan yanked her chain,” the officer said. “She held on to the chain and raised an alarm. The chain snapped and Kamalakannan took part of it and began to run.”
Other people in the ward and sub-inspectors Ambrose and Balasubramaniam, posted at the hospital, chased the robber. Within less than a minute, with other members of the public joining in, the policemen caught Kamalakannan.
However, when the policemen frisked him, they could not find the chain. “But the sub-inspectors were sure Kamalakannan had made away with part of the woman’s chain so they got an X-ray of his abdomen and found the chain in his food pipe,” one of the officers said.
Hospital staff lined up Kamalakannan for emergency surgery and doctors performed an endoscopy to remove the chain from his stomach.
“We removed the part of the chain he swallowed. It was 20cm long and weighed 9 gm,” a doctor at the hospital said.
Kamalakannan admitted to investigators interrogating him that he went to the hospital intent on snatching a gold chain. He even planned his escape, asking his friend Syed Hussain to wait in an autorickshaw in the hospital’s parking lot so he could make a swift getaway. Police arrested Kamalakannan and his associate Hussain, who they found waiting in the hospital.