Tiger blamed for 13 deaths caught in India

Indian wildlife authorities on Thursday caught a tiger blamed for killing 13 people over 10 months, an official said.

Named “Conflict Tiger”, or “CT-1”, the five-year-old male was tranquilised and caught nearly a week after officials declared it a threat to humans and authorised its capture.

The big cat has been blamed for killing 13 people in remote, forested parts of the western state of Maharashtra since last December, including two in one day.

Its most recent killing was last month.

“We have been trailing the tiger for a while and it was finally captured inside the forest,” wildlife official Kishor Mankar told AFP.

Mankar said all the victims were attacked inside the forest area, where some of them lived or had entered to collect firewood.

The tiger has been moved to the nearby Nagpur region and is being monitored by vets before a decision is taken about its future, he said.

It will either be released or remain in captivity.

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CT-1 is was far from being India’s only troublesome tiger.

On Saturday police shot dead another tiger, which had killed nine people in the eastern state of Bihar, in a major operation involving 200 people including trackers on elephants.

And students at a university in the central state of Madhya Pradesh have been told to stay indoors after dark, because of a tiger on the prowl around campus.

There has been an increase in man-animal conflict in parts of India, which conservationists blame on the rapid expansion of human settlements around forests and key wildlife corridors for animals such as elephants and tigers.

Nearly 100 people were killed in tiger attacks between 2019 and 2021 in India, according to government figures.

More than 200 tigers were killed by poachers or electrocution between 2012 and 2018, the data showed.

India is home to around 70 percent of the world’s wild tigers, with a population estimated at 2,967 in 2018.