A zookeeper has been killed in the United Kingdom in what has been described as a ‘freak accident’ involving a tiger.
According to police, the unidentified female zookeeper died after a tiger entered the enclosure she was in at Hamerton Park Zoo in Cambridgeshire, north of London. Witnesses described hearing screams and seeing keepers trying to distract tigers with pieces of meat.
A statement from the zoo said that “one of our colleagues was killed in a freak accident” and stressed that at no point was the tiger out of its enclosure or endangering the public.
I shouldn’t leave the house… Try to go to @HamertonZoo and all hell breaks loose. Evacuated and air ambulance/police/ambulances. pic.twitter.com/Kgusnwqm0f
— Jessica Russell (@jesscakatie) May 29, 2017
A witness named Pete Davis, who was visiting the zoo with his family, told reporters his account:
There’s no doubting it was a girl’s scream and something terrible had happened. It sounds like a tiger turned on her […] It was a case of total panic. There were keepers rushing about throwing about buckets of meat to try and get the tigers under control. They ushered us away to another building where they made us stay for around 10 minutes but you could see the keepers with their heads in their hands. People were really scared, they asked us to leave straight after that and closed the park.
No info about the victim or what specifically went wrong has come to light at this point.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald.
Photo: Supplied.
