A 44-year-old woman who worked with a colleague on an oil palm plantation on the island of Borneo in Indonesia's West Kalimantan province was bitten by a crocodile on Thursday.
The crocodile chased them, before biting the victim on the left hand and dragging him into a ditch, explained the man who tried in vain to snatch his colleague from the jaws of the animal. He then alerted the police in the coastal district of Ketapang.
“The body of the victim was found after 90 minutes of searching,” while the crocodile was still holding human remains in its jaws, local police chief Bagus Tri Baskoro said in a statement in the evening.
The huge island of Borneo is shared between the Kingdom of Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia, and is home to vast expanses of jungle that are home to a wide range of rare and sometimes dangerous animals. But palm oil plantations and logging projects are largely encroaching on rainforest areas, threatening the rich wildlife.
Indonesia is home to several species of crocodiles that regularly attack and kill humans. In August, a crocodile killed a 54-year-old woman who was bathing in a river in the Moluccas Islands. In 2018, in Papua, the easternmost province of Indonesia, an angry crowd massacred nearly 300 crocodiles in revenge for the death of a resident killed by one of these reptiles.
