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A man who was declared dead after a road accident and placed in a mortuary freezer for several hours was amazingly later discovered to be alive.

Electrician Srikesh Kumar had been struck by a motorcycle in Moradabad, a city just over a hundred miles east of Indian capital New Delhi. He was taken to the District Combined Hospital, where doctors declared him dead.

Early the next morning, the 40-year-old’s apparently dead body was placed in a freezer in the hospital’s mortuary. He remained there for almost seven hours, when family members came to sign documents authorising an autopsy.

It was while they were that Kumar's sister-in-law Madhu Bala noticed that he was still moving.

"He's not at all dead,” Bala cried out. “How did this happen? Look, he wants to say something, he is breathing."

The “dead” man is now being treated at a health centre in Meerut where his condition is said to be improving.

However, his sister-in-law told reporters that "he is yet to regain consciousness".

"We will lodge a complaint against the doctors for negligence as they almost killed Srikesh by putting him in a freezer," she added.

Rajendra Kumar, the hospital's medical superintendent, said Kumar's recover was "nothing short of a miracle".

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Moradabad's chief medical superintendent Dr Shiv Singh, said: "The emergency medical officer had seen the patient at 3 a.m and there was no heartbeat. He had examined the man multiple times.

“Thereafter, he was declared dead but, in the morning, a police team and his family found him alive. A probe has been ordered. Our priority is now to save his life."

He added that it was one of those "rarest of rare cases… We can't call it negligence".

It’s not all that rare. Earlier this year road accident victim Shankar Shanmukh Gombi suddenly regained consciousness moments before his post-mortem was due to start.

The 27-year-old had suffered serious head injuries from a motorcycle crash in Mahalingapur, India, on February 27.

Doctors at the private hospital had exercised "bad judgement" when they removed Gombi from the ventilator and declared him dead, according to Dr SS Galgali, who later treated him.

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