Monkey chase costs girl her life
This was no ''monkey business.'' But this tree-hopping primate unwittingly monkeying with some college girls in Karaikal, in the neighbouring Puducherry, tragically took away the life of a girl on Friday.
Mehboob Nizha, a first year Home Science course student of the Government Ouvaiyyar Women’s Arts College, fell from the building’s second floor when some monkeys loitering on the campus gave the girls a sudden scare.
As the primates began to scare away a group of girls who ran for cover, Nizha, perched on a parapet wall on the second floor, sought to follow suit. But she apparently lost her step, fell back and tumbled down some 40 feet to the ground, official sources in Karaikal told Deccan Herald over the telephone.
Nizha suffered serious head injury and was rushed to the nearby hospital where she was put on a ventilator, sources said. But doctors’ efforts to save her life were of no avail and the girl died shortly, they added.
Karaikal, about 250 km from here and close to the port town of Nagapattinam, plunged into grief as the news of the tragedy spread, sources said. The monkeys were quickly chased away, even as the college principal was huddled in a meeting on averting such monkey menace. There is a coconut grove behind the college where the monkeys usually tramp around, but this mishap was the first of its kind in the college in recent memory, a senior Police said.
