In a shocking incident, an eight-year-old boy Vikas was killed by a leopard in Belwa village of Balrampur district of Uttar Pradesh. The forest department said on Friday that the leopard took him away and his mutilated body was found in the bushes.

The incident happened on Thursday evening when Jagdamba Prasad’s son Vikas was sitting outside his house in Belwa village of Tulsipur tehsil, when the leopard hiding in the bushes caught him in its jaws and ran away into the forest. An hour later, the villagers recovered the boy’s dead body with his throat cut from the bushes near a mountain drain. District Magistrate Arvind Kumar Singh gave instructions to capture the leopard and the forest department deployed four teams for this work. Four teams of the forest department have been deployed to search for the leopard, according to Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) Dr Sam Maran M, who visited the spot to take stock of the situation. Police and SDM have been instructed to stay in the village.

District Magistrate Arvind Kumar claimed that ten cameras and four cages have been installed by the forest department to keep an eye on the leopards. DFOs of Barabanki and Siddharthnagar districts have been called for help. According to DM Singh, postmortem of the boy’s body is being conducted and as soon as the report is received, financial assistance will be given to his family. In another incident in September, a 45-year-old woman was killed by a leopard in Sohagi Barwa Wildlife Sanctuary in Maharajganj, Uttar Pradesh. The victim was identified as Sharda Rajbhar, resident of Semrahwa village of Nautanwa police station area.

Meanwhile, in another incident that took place in September this year, a leopard was killed by villagers after it injured a man and his son in Chhattisgarh’s Gariaband district. In the morning, a leopard aged 3 to 4 years entered a house in Chiwari village of Navagarh forest range and attacked the people present inside the house.