A five-year-old girl was mauled to death by a leopard in Udaipur district, police said on Thursday.
This is the fourth incident of leopard attack in the area within 10 days. This comes even after two leopards were captured by the forest department on Monday night.
The incident took place in Bhil Basti of Kudau village of Majavad Gram Panchayat around 7 pm on Wednesday evening. The big cat attacked the girl when she was washing her hands and feet near a pond. Some children who were playing nearby shouted for help in fear even as as they ran for their life. Later a village team went inside the jungle to search for the girl.
According to police, the villagers found the girl’s mutilated body on Thursday morning. According to forest officials, the girl’s severed palm was found at a distance of about 500 meters from a house.
“A little further ahead, the girl’s mutilated body was found. The girl’s face and left hand had been eaten by the leopard. While the villagers were processing the event a leopard came back from the bushes and dragged away the girl’s body,” said Mukesh Saini, DCF Udaipur.
Saini said that they are still waiting for the reports of two leopards that were caught by the forest officials on September 24 to see if they were the same that has attacked other people earlier.
“We have to check if there are more than one leopard responsible for the attacks. It has become difficult to capture the leopard in this season due to dense forest. We were thinking that we caught the leopards responsible for the attacks. But after the current incident, the teams of forest department and Army have once again become active and started deep searching the area with drones,” he said.
Army officials are using drones with sophisticated technology to trace the pug marks.
Teams from Rajsamand, Udaipur and Jodhpur are actively engaged in the search operation.
An important reason behind these attacks is that the population of herbivore animals have declined over the years as there are around 200 leopards in Udaipur range. Moreover, the rise of human population and development work like roads in the middle of the forest has also impacted their movement.
With PTI
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