Villager fakes death

OCCUPIED SRINAGAR: A Kashmiri villager faked his death and travelled more than a hundred miles in an ambulance with four others in a desperate bid to circumvent India’s virus lockdown and return home, police said on Wednesday.

Hakim Din was being treated for a minor head injury at a hospital in held Jammu when an ambulance driver suggested the 70-year-old fake his death to get past checkpoints, police said.

Din and three other men wanted to return to Poonch, a far-flung region in Indian-occupied Kashmir close to the de facto border with Pakistan. The region’s Superintendent of Police, Ramesh Angral, said the four men and the driver travelled 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."