By IANS,
Raipur : Dozens of families in the forested villages of Chhattisgarh’s Rajnandgaon district are trying to hunt down a leopard that killed a woman and several pet animals in recent weeks, a forest official said Saturday.
“A leopard has sneaked into a vast residential area in Rajnandgaon and killed and eaten a woman and several animals, including cows, for the past two weeks. The villagers are highly upset and feeling terrorized and now they have planned to repeat last month’s episode that shocked the nation when a mob killed a tigress with sticks and stones in the same area and then went on a victory lap,” a source at the forest headquarters here told IANS.
He stated that the forest department was making efforts to catch the leopard at the earliest.
“Local forest officials in villages in Rajnandgaon district have been asked to make special efforts to catch the leopard alive and also persuade villagers not to hunt the animal,” the source stated.
The villages, which are based some 200 km west of state capital Raipur, close to the Maharashtra border, had witnessed terror of a tigress till Sep 24. The villagers got over the problem when they lynched the big cat in the presence of forest officials.
The state government ordered a probe into the killing by the National Tiger Conservation Authority and vowed to take action against the villagers based on the findings of the report.