Hunt on for man-eater leopard after woman mauled to death

Rising cases of man-leopard conflict have panicked villagers in Magadi taluk on the western outskirts of Bengaluru. Days after a leopard killed a three-year-old boy at Kadirayyana Palya, a 62-year-old woman was found mauled to death by a big cat on Friday.

The back-to-back incidents prompted the forest department to launch a massive search operation to trap the animal.

A forest official in Magadi said the woman, Gangamma, was sleeping outside her home in Motagondanahalli when the leopard mauled her to death. It then dragged her body to a farmland, leaving different body parts along the way. The boy had been mauled to death under similar circumstances.

Although forest officials had trapped a leopard on Wednesday, they are not sure if it was the same animal that killed the child. They had kept six cages to trap the leopard. The department has formed special squads and deployed one of them to track the leopard’s movements by using camera traps. On Saturday, the chief wildlife warden appealed to the villagers to not step out alone after 6 pm.