Caretaker recounts how he survived lion attack
The caretaker of a lion that bolted out of its cage at a zoo located inside the General Hassan Usman Katsina Park in Kaduna has recounted his ordeal.
Mustapha Adam spoke to Daily Trust yesterday at the emergency unit of the Barau Dikko Specialists Hospital Kaduna where he is presently receiving treatment.
“I have been feeding the lion for the past eight months, even though the lion has been in the zoo for three years after the zoo was commissioned by the Yero administration.
“The accident was as a result of my carelessness, I thought that since I had been feeding it for over eight months the animal had gotten used to me. So on that day when I came to feed it, I did not close the inner cage like I usually do whenever I come to feed it, and before I knew what was happening, the lion grabbed my neck.
“It took the intervention of the Sarkin Pawa of the Zango abattoir, who was there when the incident occurred and other park officers, who threw a chunk of meat into the cage and the lion let go of me and charged for the meat. The next thing I remembered was that I lost consciousness and woke up in the hospital.”
Our correspondent gathered that the park was leased to a private company who employed Adam, a butcher from the Zango abattoir, to feed the lion with raw meat twice a day.
Attempts to get officials for comments were not successful.