Over 40 hours of Saif Ali Khan's stabbing, 5 key questions remain unanswered

Actor Saif Ali Khan was stabbed in the early hours of Thursday as he fought an armed burglar who entered his Bandra house. Khan underwent surgery at Mumbai's Lilavati hospital and is recovering. However, even after 40 hours of the security scare in an upscale housing society, there are some questions which need to be heard.

In Short

• Saif Ali Khan was stabbed forty hours ago, but some questions remain
• The question remains how intruder managed to evade building security
• Saif Ali Khan was rushed to hospital in an auto, also puzzles many

Actor Saif Ali Khan was stabbed in the wee hours of Thursday as he fought an armed burglar who entered his Bandra house. Khan underwent a surgery at Mumbai's Lilavati hospital and is recuperating. However, even after 40 hours of the security scare in an upscale housing society, several key questions remain unanswered.

Saif stays with his family and their household staff in a duplex on the 11th and 12th floor of the Satguru Sharan building in Bandra.

Most of the details that have emerged are from the police complaint filed by 56-year-old house help, Eliyama Philip, who first spotted the intruder.

She said she was woken up at around 2 am on Thursday and found a stranger emerging from the bathroom and head towards the bed of Jehangir, Saif and Kareena Kapoor's youngest son.

When asked what he wanted, the intruder, armed with a wooden object and a sharp weapon, demanded Rs 1 crore.

A commotion brought Saif and Kareena to the room, and the intruder attacked him. With the help of the household staff, the family locked the intruder in the room, but he somehow managed to flee.

This sequence of events gives rise to several questions, which have remained unanswered even after 36 hours of the attack.

1. HOW DID INTRUDER MANAGE TO EVADE BUILDING SECURITY?

At first, a footage of the intruder emerged showing him fleeing the building through the fire escape stairs. That was at 2.33 am on Thursday.

Another CCTV footage emerged a day later, showing him entering the building stealthily, his face covered with a gamcha, at 1.37 am on Thursday.

It is suspected that he reached the bathroom through the shaft, but what is hard to understand is how the intruder could have evaded other cameras and the security personnel at the building in a posh area.

2. HOW DID THE INTRUDER MANAGE TO ESCAPE FROM THE ROOM?

According to the police complaint, the intruder was locked up in the room by Saif and the household staff. They then moved to the 12th floor to attend to the wounds sustained by the actor and Philip.

What remains a mystery is how the intruder managed to escape the room. Did he use the same shaft window by which he entered the room?

3. HOW WAS THE INTRUDER FAMILIAR WITH BUILDING LAYOUT?

That the intruder managed to enter the building and get into one of the rooms of Saif Ali Khan's duplex without being noticed raises the question of whether he was familiar with the building's layout.

There are only two ways by which he could be aware of the layout of the building and Saif's duplex: either he had visited the building earlier, as a visitor or a professional; or he was informed by someone in the housing society.

How the intruder was well-versed with the building's layout is among the unanswered questions.

4. WHY WAS SAIF ALI KHAN TAKEN TO HOSPITAL IN AN AUTO?

There is one question that is puzzling almost everybody. Why was Saif Ali Khan rushed to hospital in an auto, and not one of the vehicles he uses?

The auto driver who took Saif to the hospital, barely 2 km from his Bandra residence, said the actor was accompanied by a "small child", likely his seven-year-old son Taimur, and another person.

The driver told India Today that the actor, whom he didn't recognise at first, was bleeding from the neck and his white kurta had turned red.

Several reports, based on sources, claimed either the car was not "ready" or no driver was available at the residence. That, however, remains one of the most-asked questions -- why was Saif taken to hospital in an auto?

5. WHY WAS NO ADULT FAMILY MEMBER ACCOMPANYING SAIF?

The other question pertains to why a 7-year-old child was the only family member accompanying Saif as the bleeding actor was taken to Lilavati.

Though his wife, Kareena Kapoor Khan, was there at their residence at the time of the attack, she didn't accompany him to the hospital.

A video on social media showed her pacing and speaking to the house staff at the entrance of the building after the stabbing incident.

That is the fifth unanswered question related to Saif Ali Khan's stabbing and the events that followed.