Andreas Mihavecz holds the world record for surviving without food or drink after being locked in a cell

An Austrian man’s ordeal led to him inadvertently becoming the holder of an unenviable Guinness World Record.

It’s not just people who are trying for world records that find themselves in the book, and in the case of Andreas Mihavecz you wouldn’t want to beat him.

That’s because Mihavecz’s experiences in 1979 earned him the longest recorded case of survival without food and water.

Aged 18 and working as bricklayer’s apprentice at the time, it all began when Mihavecz was put in a holding cell in a local government building.

He was reportedly taken into custody mistakenly as he had been a passenger in a crashed car.

But in a horrifying development all three of the police officers who were responsible for Mihavecz forgot he was there.

Andreas Mihavecz was just 18 years old at the time. (VICTOR de SCHWANBERG/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / Getty)

In a bizarre scenario, each claimed to have believed that the other two officers had already freed the detainee.

Not only that, they also ignored his mom when she began questioning what had become of her son.

You may be thinking – why did he not just shout for help until someone came?

Well, he did, but the cell was located in the basement which meant that no matter how loud he screamed for help, no one could hear him.

Mihavecz was only discovered when another officer noticed that a bad smell was emanating from the cell he was being held in.

Following his rescue Mihavecz needed months to recover, but despite the length of his ordeal he did somehow survive.

The officers responsible for Mihavecz forget about him. (Getty Stock Image)

The then-18-year-old was first locked up on April 1. His rescuer only found him in the cell on April 18, meaning he was trapped in there for 19 days.

The three officers responsible for his accidental imprisonment were Markus Weber, Heinz Ceheter and Erwin Schneider, and were charged in a criminal trial.

Each of them blamed the others for the incident, and in the end they received a fine of around €2,000 as it could not be established which of them was the most culpable.

One question remains. The human body can go for up to three weeks without food, but mere days without access to water, so how did Mihavecz survive for so long apparently without hydration?

He was able to make it by ingesting condensation water from the walls of his cell.

By the end, it’s believed Mihavecz lost around 24kg of his body weight.