Indian police on Monday recovered the body of a magician who drowned while trying to replicate an underwater Houdini-inspired stunt — tying himself up with chains and ropes and being lowered into a river.
Rescue workers late on Monday found the body of Chanchal Lahiri in the Hooghly River, said Syed Waquar Raza, the deputy commissioner of Kolkata police’s port division.
The 40-year-old Lahiri, who was known by his stage name “Jadugar Mandrake” (Wizard Mandrake), was lowered by winch into the river in Kolkata on Sunday in a yellow and red costume.
Photo: AFP
However, the 40-year-old — his legs and his arms tightly bound — failed to emerge from the water, to the horror of onlookers, including his family and team members.
Authorities had initially believed that the vanishing act could be part of Lahiri’s stunt, but immediately mobilized help to rescue him.
Lahiri told reporters before the attempted escape act that he had pulled off a similar stunt 21 years ago at the same venue.
“I was inside a bulletproof glass box tied with chain and locks and dropped down from Howrah Bridge. Then I came out within 29 seconds,” he said.
He admitted it would be tough to free himself this time.
“If I can open it up then it will be magic, but if I can’t it will be tragic,” he said.
He also said he was undertaking the death-defying stunt to “revive interest in magic.”
When Lahiri tried another stunt at the river in 2013, he was assaulted by onlookers who saw him escape from a locked cage via a door that was clearly visible.
He was beaten and punched and his long flowing golden-brown wig was pulled off by the crowd.
Almost a decade earlier, he declared he would walk on the river waters, but had to beat a hasty retreat when the act went wrong.
Harry Houdini, a Hungarian-born American stuntman, became a sensation in the early 20th century with daredevil feats.
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since