Man-eater caught

Press, 12 April 1978, Page 11

Man-eater caught

A big leopard, believed to be the beast that has killed 18 persons, mainly women and children, in the Himalayan foothills of India has been captured after a four-month hunt. The man-eater, which terrorised the population for a year in a 40-square kilometre area round Lansdowne. 320 kilometres north of New Delhi, walked into a cage baited with a goat two days ago, newspapers have reported. The district authorities had put a price of 5500

rupees (about $700) on the leopard’s head, and professional hunters from all over India had joined the police in the hunt for it. They killed at least five leopards and one hyena before the hunt ended. The leopard, reported to be 2.55 m (about Bft) from nose to tail-tip, was sedated and brought to Lucknow, the capital of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where experts said they were certain it was the man-eater. Most of the leopard’s vic-

tints were young women and children. Terrorstricken villagers had refused to move out of their homes after dark. A chief wild-life warden, Mr V. B. Singh, said in Lucknow that all indications were that the trapped Leopard was the killer because it had only one leftupper canine tooth. The remaining three were missing.

Injuries on some children wounded by the leopard had showed that the animal had only one large canine.