Doctors have removed 40 knives from a policeman's stomach after he developed a taste for swallowing blades.

Surjeet Singh from Amritsar in northern India complained to medical experts that had been suffering from severe stomach aches and a low appetite.

They initially thought he had developed a tumour but a biopsy revealed metal inside his body.

Mr Singh suffered from a disorder that gave him an urge to swallow knives, according to surgeon Jitendra Malhotra.

The patient said he developed the habit while he recovered from a traffic accident in Chandigarh.


He said: "I could not walk properly after that. I used to sit idle and started swallowing down knives. It pained a little."

Image: Surjeet Singh pictured with medical experts

Mr Singh thought he had swallowed 28 knives but doctors actually found 40 after a five-hour long operation.

The surgeon said: "As soon as we placed the camera inside, we saw some metallic material on our screen. In those metallic materials, there were shards of blades and woods which were very rare and surreal.

"I had never seen anything like this in my 20 years of practice. We thought they were knives and retrospectively asked the patient and he said he has this urge to swallow knives.

"The patient said that he had swallowed 28 knives but we removed 40.

Image: X-rays show some of the knives in the man's stomach

"To check that there were no more knives left and to ensure that the patient does not come up with the same problem again, we conducted a metallic scan of the whole body including the stomach.

"We found that we had removed all the knives from the stomach. The surgery was a success."

Mr Singh is now in a stable condition following the procedure.