Killer elephant returned to trample body

AN ELEPHANT crushed a woman to death in India only to return during her funeral to pull her body off a pyre and trample over her corpse again.

The incident was said to have occurred in the eastern Indian state of Odisha on Thursday and comes amid rising animal-human conflict in the country.

Maya Murmu, 70, was attacked by a wild elephant that had strayed from a nearby wildlife sanctuary while she was collecting water in the district of Mayurbhanj. She was taken to hospital but later died and her body was placed on a funeral pyre the same evening.

On Saturday evening, while her family members were performing her last rites, the same elephant appeared and took Ms Murmu’s body from the pyre and trampled on it, before tossing it around. Her terrified family members fled the scene and were only able to complete Ms Murmu’s last rites several hours later once the elephant had left the area.

Elephant-human conflict is on the rise in India owing to deforestation, which pushes elephants outside shrinking protected areas in the search for food. The elephant that attacked Ms Murmu had strayed from the Dalma Wildlife Sanctuary, near the city of Jamshedpur, where there have been reports of uncontrolled mining, treefelling and construction work in the reserve’s buffer zone.