Surgeons remove 12 gold bars from Indian man's stomach

Surgeons called the three-hour operation to remove 12 gold bars from an Indian man's stomach earlier this month "tedious."

You think?

The 63-year-old businessman visited his doctor in Delhi, saying he had swallowed a bottle cap out of anger. Instead, surgeons discovered 12 gold bars, weighing nearly a pound. India is the world's largest gold consumer, and people try to smuggle the substance into the country, because of the high duty costs.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Doctors told the BBC that authorities were questioning the businessman, and that they had taken the gold, which is pretty brave, considering.

"I remember having taken out a bladder stone weighing 1kg from a patient," Dr. CS Ramachandran, a senior surgeon at Delhi's Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said. "But finding gold in a patient's stomach was something unbelievable."