The 63-year-old man was admitted to hospital after complaining of vomiting and difficulty defecating.
He told his doctor that he had swallowed a bottle cap in anger, after a fight with his wife.
But when surgeons operated they found gold bars weighing nearly 400g (14oz) in his stomach instead of a bottle cap.
Doctors, who performed the operation on 9 April, told the BBC that police and customs authorities had questioned the businessman and confiscated the gold.
Dr CS Ramachandran, a senior surgeon at Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, said he had never seen a “case like this in my life”.’We got an X-ray done and it didn’t appear to be a cap. As the gold bars got stacked one behind the other it appeared to be a metal. We were shocked to find not one but 12 gold bars in his abdomen.
“This is the first time I have recovered gold from the stomach of a patient. I remember having taken out a bladder stone weighing 1kg from a patient. But finding gold in a patient’s stomach was something unbelievable,” he said.’If it would have stayed inside for couple of more days, it would have led to severe bleeding and rupture of the intestine and septicemia.’
“It was a tedious three-hour-long operation. The businessman, who had undergone four stomach surgeries in the past and is a diabetic, was admitted to the hospital earlier this month, with symptoms of “acute intestinal obstruction”, Dr Ramachandran added.
India is one of the world’s largest consumers of gold but has recently tightened regulations on gold imports following a rise in smuggling.
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