Ingrid Norzin Braun, 57, had gone to Apollo Hospital on Tuesday morning for an MRI of her spine. She was asked to leave all her belongings except her clothes inside one of the six lockers near the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) room by the technician. When she came back after the MRI, a purse that contained the cash and documents were missing from the bag. There was cash amounting to $1,800 and Rs 4,000 in the purse.

An FIR was filed at the Sarita Vihar Police Station later in the afternoon. Says Braun: ``I had taken all my cash in the morning because I had to buy my flight tickets for California,'' she says. She was to leave in three days. ``Now I am not going anywhere. I cannot even move out of here,'' she says, sitting at the Tushita Meditation Centre at Haus Khaz.

According to the hospital, the patient was given the keys to the locker. ``Usually, patients are accompanied by someone. She was alone and had kept her keys in her gown which also had to be removed for the MRI,'' a spokesperson for the hospital says.

Braun says she kept the two keys inside the pocket of her gown and hung it near her bed. But the technician covered her face so that she could see nothing, she adds.

She was reportedly puzzled by the fact that the MRI took 45 minutes when the technician told her in the beginning that it would take only five minutes. ``He came back after 15 minutes and said he would need another five minutes. He then returned after half an hour,'' she says.

She realised she had been robbed after she got into her rented car and the driver asked for Rs 10 to pay for parking. ``My purse was missing while nothing else in the other pockets of the bag had been touched,'' she says.Head of the hospital, Brigadier C.B. Shukla told her that she could file a police report and on his part he had got the technician and a doctor frisked. But it was already too late as the theft took place around 10 a.m. and it was nearly 4 p.m. then, she said. When she told the hospital head she had lost all her money in the hospital locker, Shukla said he could not do anything except pay her taxi fare home.

``I have been travelling in and out of India for the past 15 years but I have not lost even five rupees so far,'' says Braun.