from Earth First! Newswire
Citizens of Meerut in northern India were panicked by a rampaging wild leopard last week, which has managed to elude all attempts to capture or tranquilize it.
According to CNN, the leopard was first sighted in a local shop Sunday, then was briefly cornered in a nearby hospital. Animal control was called in to apprehend the dangerous predator, but it made a daring escape through a hospital window, darting into a movie theater and later through a nearby apartment building.
Six people were injured Sunday, including a police officer who was treated for a large gash in his shoulder.
Authorities ordered schools and colleges closed on Monday and asked people to stay indoors as police teams scoured the city. Shopkeepers lowered their shutters and the city streets emptied. Soldiers also joined the hunt after the leopard was first spotted in the army hospital Sunday afternoon.
“We cordoned off the area and waited. It emerged some hours later and jumped, injuring a police inspector,” Singh said. The animal leaped over the roofs of single-storied homes and disappeared.
Since then groups of wildlife officials wearing helmets and carrying tranquilizer guns and volunteers armed with sticks have been searching a wide swathe around the hospital.
At one point, forestry officials closed in on the leopard in a warehouse, but it leaped through a concrete grill, breaking it and escaping.
“It’s a fully grown male … a big animal with enormous strength, which is what has panicked residents,” Singh said.
“We were afraid to go out of the house. There was a lot of panic and fear,” homemaker Pooja Mahajan said Tuesday. “But no one has spotted the leopard since yesterday, so today things are back to normal.”
Singh said schools and colleges reopened Tuesday.
Wildlife officials were on alert but it was likely the animal had fled to nearby forests, he said.
Leopards are protected in India, though more are straying into cities and villages to search for food as their habitats shrink.
Meerut, a bustling commercial city in Uttar Pradesh state, is about 40 miles northeast of the Indian capital, New Delhi.
In another part of Uttar Pradesh, a female tiger has killed nine people, most of them poor villagers and farm laborers living on the fringes of a wildlife reserve park.
Forest officials roped in wildlife hunters to track down the tiger but gave up after nearly two weeks of a futile search.
