We are currently in a period of social distancing thanks to the lockdown announced by many countries in a bid to curb the spread of novel coronavirus.
In a bid to escape lockdown and travel home, a Kashmiri villager faked his death and traveled more than a hundred miles in an ambulance with four others to return home.
The police revealed that the 70-year-old man identified as Hakim Din made this desperate move because he wanted to return to Poonch, a far-flung region in Indian-administered Kashmir close to the de facto border with Pakistan.
The region’s Superintendent of Police, Ramesh Angral, said the four men and the driver traveled more than 160 kilometres (100 miles) in the ambulance, passing many checkpoints using a fake death certificate from the hospital.
“The ambulance was stopped at the last checkpoint before they could reach home,” Angral told AFP.
“A policeman there immediately figured out that the man lying covered inside the ambulance could not be dead.”
The men were arrested and quarantined separately, Angral said, adding that they faced charges of “cheating and defying the government’s prohibitory orders”.
Hakim Din was being treated for a minor head injury at a hospital in Jammu when an ambulance driver suggested the 70-year-old fake his death to get past checkpoints.
There are no known coronavirus cases in the Poonch region.
The Indian government announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown last Wednesday to curb the spread of coronavirus.
The nationwide lockdown comes in the wake of a long-running curfew in Kashmir, imposed as New Delhi scrapped the restive region’s semi-autonomous status on August 5.
But some Kashmiris have been left stranded in cities and unable to return home to their villages after the sudden nationwide lockdown announcement.
In March, we reported the case of a man in Spain that was arrested for walking the streets wearing a T-Rex dinosaur outfit to take his rubbish outside while the country is on lockdown.
It is gathered that the man who tested positive for coronavirus was arrested after he was seen dressed as an enormous brown dinosaur.
The Murcia Police located in the southeastern Spanish city shared footage of the man dressed as a dinosaur and warned citizens to stay at home.
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