The rope made out of bedsheets seen dangling out of the hotel balcony.

Gulf Today Report

It’s the kind of scene one comes across in Bollywood movies, where the heroine adopts this technique to escape from the clutches of the villain or her tormentors. In this case, the ‘tormentor’ was a very unusual entity: quarantine.

Earlier this month, a woman in the Australian city of Cairns scaled down two balconies and kicked in a door to escape quarantine.

Now, an Australian man in Perth has gone one step further: he made a makeshift rope tying bedsheets together and descended from the window of the fourth-floor room in the hotel where he was quarantined.

The man arrived in the city from Brisbane but was told he could not enter the city under strict anti-virus rules.

The man was told to leave the state within 48 hours and taken to a hotel for temporary quarantine, but just before 1am  on Tuesday (17:00 GMT on Monday) he escaped.

Police nabbed the man across town about 8 hours later, and charged him with stepping out of line, providing misinformation in the process.

He was 39 years old and tested negative for the coronavirus.