Ahmedabad: A woman may have carried a deadly surprise home from work after a highly venomous common krait slithered in and curled up beneath a handkerchief inside her handbag at the Gandhinagar hospital where she worked.The snake was spotted around 2 am on Saturday, sparking a scare at the hospital. It had slithered down the parking ramp and disappeared among five bags kept in the hospital basement.A supervisor and two employees were in the basement when they spotted the sneaky stowaway and quickly threw a large cloth over the bags before calling an environmentalist and snake rescuer.However, when the rescuer arrived, the snake had vanished.The hunt then shifted to the handbags. The roaming reptile was finally found in a side compartment of one bag, hiding beneath a handkerchief and other belongings.The rescuer carefully pulled out the krait and later released it in a forest.He said, “The common krait is among India’s four major venomous snakes. Its tiny teeth can make a bite difficult to notice, while symptoms may not appear immediately. This makes it particularly dangerous.”The terrifying surprise could have ended very differently had the woman picked up the bag without checking.
