Indian police officers ferry thousands of criminals to different courts and jails every day. Most of them are kept under tight security, but some still find innovative ways to escape.

Bees and chairs may not sound like ideal tools to design an escape, but underestimating them can be costly as some policemen recently discovered in India.

The BBC’s Vikas Pandey details four of some of the most unusual ways Indian prisoners have escaped.


‘Invitation to escape’

A cartoon showing a man escaping with a plastic chair from a Mumbai police stationImage copyrightKirtish Bhatt

A man handcuffed to a plastic chair in a Mumbai police station last week simply “kept the the chair on his head” and “walked off rather casually when the “watching policeman who was seated on the plastic chair left the room to run an errand”.

The Indian Express reports that when “the policemen went through the CCTV footage, their jaws dropped”.

Police officers have since admitted that handcuffing a suspect to a plastic chair possibly wasn’t the best idea.

“Handcuffing an accused to a plastic chair is like giving him an invitation to escape,” a senior officer said.


‘Sting operation’

A cartoon shows a suspect running out a police station that came under attack from honey beesImage copyrightKirtish Bhatt

Police in Gurgaon, a suburban area near Delhi, were undone by some bees that clearly had no respect for law and order.

A normal morning for policemen turned busy on 4 November when a swarm of honey bees from a nearby tree entered the Farrukhnagar police station.

While the policemen took cover under the tables and chairs in the station, a detainee just walked out.

As The Times of India put it, “no one saw this one coming”.


‘Just visiting’

A cartoon shows a convict posing as a visitor to escape the prisonImage copyrightKirtish Bhatt

In what has to be one of the unlikeliest tales, this murder convict gave the slip to a prison guard in Bangalore by changing his identity in April.

But he didn’t go for a full makeover. He simply stamped the jail’s temporary visitor mark on his wrist and walked out.

The police inquiry found that “a casual approach by the prison guards and lack of due diligence in cross-verifying the claims of Manjunath [the convict] led to his escape”.

The officials said that the escaped inmate “somehow managed to procure the seal – which the prison guards apply on the visitors at the central prison on arrival”.


Through the bathroom window

A cartoon shows a man escaping from a police station through the shaft of the toiletImage copyrightKirtish Bhatt

And finally, a man in Mumbai in 2008 used his acting skills and the toilet of a hospital to escape police custody.

Mumbai police shifted the man from prison to a hospital after he complained that he couldn’t move his legs.

The man eventually asked to be taken to the toilet, where after 30 minutes, he walked out of the toilet in front of three policemen who were supposed to be keeping watch.

A senior official told the paper that the policemen had seen the man only on the wheelchair, which meant that they were unable to identify him when he w