A police officer attached to the UAE consulate in the Kerala capital, at the centre of a gold smuggling controversy, was found with his wrist slit in an apparent suicide attempt on Friday and kept saying while being taken to hospital: “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

A policeman from the armed reserve unit, Jai Ghosh had been posted as a gunman of the UAE consul-general in Thiruvananthapuram before the envoy left India in March before the lockdown was announced.

Ghosh — whose call records show his cellphone had received at least one call from one of the accused in the case, Swapna Suresh, after the baggage containing gold from the UAE was seized at Thiruvananthapuram airport — had been missing since 7.30pm on Thursday and his family had lodged a missing person’s diary.

The local police had launched a search for him. About 18 hours later, Ghosh was spotted by a passer-by falling off a wall that separates a wooded area from the road, 400 metres from his home at Aakulam in the Kerala capital.

Benny, a local, told reporters he saw Ghosh falling from the 6ft-high wall while he was passing by on a motorbike around 1pm on Friday.

Ghosh had been bleeding, and Benny alerted other local people who called the police.

While being taken into a police van Ghosh kept saying: “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

On the way to the hospital, Ghosh told the police that he had swallowed the blade he had used to slash himself. His condition is stated to be stable.

The police said Ghosh had spent the night in a vacant building near the spot where he was found and had then moved into the wooded area via the banks of a nearby lake. Nobody usually goes to that place due to the thick undergrowth and tall trees, a possible haven for reptiles.

A police source said Ghosh’s family had told cops that he had appeared traumatised for the past few days and had wept when he was with his mother on Thursday. He told her that he was innocent but the investigating agencies would trap him, the source said.

Ghosh had not been going to work regularly after the consul-general, Jamal Hussain Al Zaabi, left for the UAE in March.

Ghosh had recently surrendered the pistol that had been assigned to him when he became the gunman of the consul-general about three years ago.