BANGKOK: An elephant trampled its handler to death and ran off with two Russian tourists — a mother and her 9-year-old daughter — who were riding it during a trek in southern Thailand, police said.
Rescue teams tracked down the elephant about 3 km away and tranquilized it to rescue the tourists clinging to its back, police Lt. Col. Narong Laksanawimol said.
“It took almost three hours for the elephant to calm down completely. We had to tie it to a tree,” Narong said by telephone.
He said the animal began attacking the 60-year-old handler about 15 minutes after the start of what was supposed to be a scenic ride for the tourists near a waterfall in the city of Phang Nga. The handler’s crushed body was found in a creek.
He said the male elephant had never attacked anyone since it began working for a tourist company two years ago, adding that the animal was in musth, a state of aggressive sexual excitement.
Thai elephant tramples man, runs off with tourists
Thai elephant tramples man, runs off with tourists
Vietnam police find frozen tiger bodies, arrest two men
Vietnamese police have found two dead tigers inside freezers in a man’s basement, arresting him and another for illicit trade in the endangered animal, the force said Saturday.
The Southeast Asian country is a consumption hub and popular trading route for illegal animal products, including tiger bones which are used in traditional medicine.
Police in Thanh Hoa province, south of the capital Hanoi, said they had found the frozen bodies ot two adult tigers, weighing about 400 kilograms (882 pounds) in total, in the basement of 52-year-old man Hoang Dinh Dat.
In a statement posted online, police said the man told officers he had bought the animals for two billion dong ($77,000), identifying the seller as 31-year-old Nguyen Doan Son.
Both had been arrested earlier this week, police said.
According to the statement, the buyer had equipment to produce so-called tiger bone glue, a sticky substance believed to heal skeletal ailments.
Tigers used to roam Vietnam’s forests, but have now disappeared almost entirely.
