Nainital: A tiger reportedly killed and carried away a man from close to the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand after dusk on Saturday. A search operation was launched on Sunday and only the man’s head was recovered by forest department officials. The remaining portion of the body was apparently consumed by the maneater.
This is the fourth such incident around the country’s oldest national park over the last one month, officials said.
The attack took place in the Bela Beat area of the Ramnagar Forest Division. The man’s identity is yet to be ascertained and it is not known what he was doing in that area at that time,
A forest department team rushed to the spot soon after receiving an alert, but a full-scale operation could only be launched on Sunday morning. Search teams followed the tiger’s pugmarks till nearly two kilometres inside the forest before coming across the “kill”.
“Only the head was recovered; the rest of the body parts were consumed by the big cat,” a forest department official has been quo
ted as saying by The New Indian Express.
The attack took place after dusk, it has been revealed. A search operation was launched immediately but had to be called off late on Saturday night due to poor visibility and safety concerns for the rescue team.
“This incident occurred late in the evening when the tiger lifted the individual from the road and took him into the forest. We conducted a continuous search overnight, but had to halt the operation for safety reasons as darkness increased. The intensive search resumed at dawn,” Ankit Badola, sub divisional officer of the Ramnagar Forest Division, said.
It was during this renewed search that the horrific evidence was found. Badola confirmed that the identity of the deceased remains unknown. “The body is being sent for post-mortem examination, and DNA sampling will also be conducted to try and confirm the victim’s identity,” he said.
The forest department has heightened vigil in the area and villagers residing near the buffer zone have been strictly advised to avoid venturing into forest areas until the situation is contained.
While human deaths due to stray tiger attacks are not uncommon near national parks, the presence of a maneater has certainly led to alarm, both among locals and forest department staff.
A tiger that takes to man-eating, either due to age, injury or disease, normally avoids its natural prey and attacks humans as they are easier to kill.