Dogs devour Indian hospital patient

Feral dogs may have been to blame for the death of a hospital patient in India.

A woman who went missing from a hospital in Bhopal has been found - eaten by dogs - after patients complained of an unbearable stench.

The 70-year-old woman disappeared on March 22, according to news.com.au.

Sanitation workers were called into the Madhya Pradesh public facility after doctors and patients complained of a growing sickly smell.

They found what remained of her body.

Scrapes on the ground indicate a pack of dogs had dragged it some two metres into undergrowth.

"Only her head and some upper body parts are left. The rest has been eaten up by animals," a local police spokesman said.

The Times of India reports it is not known if the woman had died before being taken by the dogs, or if the dogs had killed her.

"It was just a head and half the torso. Even that had been chewed up. It was gruesome.

There wasn't much left for a post-mortem," a hospital official told the news service.

Only the remains of her purse, along with a few scraps of clothing, betrayed her identity.

"How did she end up in the backyard of the ward where she was admitted? Why wasn't any information given to police after she went missing? And what did the authorities do to trace her? These are some of the aspects we are investigating," the police spokesman said.

It's not the first time dogs have attacked patients in Indian hospitals.

On January 7, dogs mutilated the body of a newborn child outside the Shahdol district hospital.

In December last year, rats reportedly defiled a corpse in Hamidia Hospital, Bhopal, while dogs ran off with the remains of a stillborn baby in Satna district.