Depending on who's after you, that could just as easily draw attention, concentrate the search on both floors and escalate to a pursuit. Without the means to outrun or fight a pursuer, every animal's natural instinct is to hide...which guarantees you're close by.
When it comes to hiding/camoflauge, the goal is not to mislead-- you don't want someone to look at you and see a random shrub or find fake evidence of an escape. That raises suspicion. The goal is to make someone looking directly at you have no idea you're even there, where you were or where you're going.
He did this to physically shield himself from random shrapnel. His purpose in opening the balcony door was to give the impression that somebody may have egressed.
This is taught in tradecraft courses, and this mention along with others in the article suggests to me that he's been through some tradecraft and/or SERE-type trainings -- probably oriented towards journalists.
Err pilots, I meant. I got some wires cross in my head when typing that out.
I attended one such tradecraft class and was remembering that virtually all my classmates were journalists headed into theater (Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan).
When it comes to hiding/camoflauge, the goal is not to mislead-- you don't want someone to look at you and see a random shrub or find fake evidence of an escape. That raises suspicion. The goal is to make someone looking directly at you have no idea you're even there, where you were or where you're going.