Noida: A man arrested for allegedly murdering a four-year-old boy last month gave cops the slip at the District Hospital on Tuesday, crawled through the AC duct and remained holed up inside a 3ft by 2ft rack for six hours as 30 policemen from three police stations searched for him in the whole compound.
The accused, Vijay, had been arrested on Monday night after a gunfight with the police and brought to the hospital for treating a bullet wound in his right leg. Around 10am on Tuesday, he asked the three cops guarding his ward for permission to go to the bathroom. “When he did not come out for long, the policemen got suspicious and forced open the door, only to find the accused missing,” said a hospital official.
As news spread that a murder accused had escaped, senior officers and cops from three police stations started a search for Vijay. They scanned CCTV footage, which showed Vijay entering the washroom and then the false ceiling. However, there was no footage that showed Vijay leaving the hospital compound.
“The police suspected he may have escaped from behind the hospital building and sneaked into the quarters. But there was no footage to support that. The accused was certainly hiding inside the hospital premises,” an officer said.
When the police tracked his escape route later, they learnt that Vijay had broken the bathroom window, entered the false ceiling of that particular floor and crawled into the AC duct. “Through the AC duct, he reached room number 111 in the orthopaedic OPD,” the official said.
He hid himself inside a tiny rack used to store soaps and handwashes for doctors below the wash basin and waited for his chance to escape. The police searched this room at least 10 times, but failed to trace Vijay.
What gave him away was the sound of heavy breathing. “We checked the rack around 4pm and found him hiding inside it. No one could imagine a fully grown man would be hiding there,” additional DCP (crime) Elamaran G told TOI. Vijay is accused of killing a four-year-old boy from his neighbourhood in Surajpur. The kid’s body was found in a swamp after 21 days.