PTI, NEW DELHI: A 29-year-old inmate of Tihar Jail swallowed a mobile phone out of fear of getting caught by prison officials during checking, police said on Wednesday.
The device was removed from his body after an endoscopy, they said.
A purported video of an X-ray of the inmate's abdomen with the phone in his stomach has emerged.
According to Director General (Delhi Prisons) Sandeep Goel, the incident took place on January 5 when the jail staff was conducting a check. Afraid of getting caught with a mobile phone, the inmate lodged in Central Jail no 1, swallowed it.
He was taken to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital and later, shifted to GB Pant Hospital for treatment, officials said.
The mobile phone was taken out of his body by the doctors through endoscopy, Goel said.
The inmate who is an undertrial in a case of murder has been discharged and is back in the prison, officials said, adding that his condition is stable.
The endoscopy was performed by Dr Siddharth Srivastava from the Department of Gastroenterology, GB Pant Hospital.
"The patient was presented to us on January 15 with ingestion of foreign body. The X-ray of the abdomen was done which revealed the likelihood of the presence of mobile phone in the stomach," Srivastava said.
"An endoscopy was done and the mobile was taken out of the mouth using a snare,"he added.
This is the tenth incident of a prisoner ingesting a mobile phone that has been reported to us in the last two years, he said.