Boy, 10, dies in vicious monkey attack outside temple in western India
A 10-year-old boy in India has died after suffering severe injuries from a monkey attack.
Dipak Thakor encountered monkeys while playing with his friends near a temple in the western state of Gujarat on Tuesday.
The boy was rushed home after the attack in which he received grievous injuries and then taken to a hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead on arrival, reported the Press Trust of India.
This was the third such attack within a week on the residents of Salki village, where the incident took place, said an official.
India is no stranger to monkey attacks as there has been an increase in human encroachment in animal habitats across the country.
Monkeys are often spotted in tourist areas, and there have been many instances in the past of the animals causing injuries to people and even other animals such as dogs.
Authorities have been trying to catch monkeys around Salki village, forest official Vishal Chaudhary was quoted as saying by Indian news channel NDTV.
“We have rescued two langurs (a species of monkey native to Indian subcontinent) in the past one week, and set up cages to trap another langur,” he said.
“There is a large troop of monkeys in the village, including four adults who have been involved in attacks in the past one week.”
Two of the monkeys have been rescued and efforts are ongoing to capture another, said Mr Chaudhary.
In December 2021, two monkeys were captured by the forest department in India’s western Maharashtra state for supposedly killing puppies in what villagers described as an “act of revenge”.
Residents of Lavool village in the state’s Beed district said monkeys had been killing puppies by carrying them up trees or to rooftops and dropping them to their deaths.
In May 2020, a gang of monkeys attacked a laboratory worker and ran off with Covid blood samples. The animals reportedly targeted the technician as he walked through the campus of a medical college in northern Uttar Pradesh state’s Meerut city.
In 2020, when Donald Trump visited India as US president, police armed with catapults were assigned to protect him from a horde of feral monkeys during his visit to the Taj Mahal.
More recently this year, officials in India’s capital Delhi deployed trained “monkey men” or impersonators and cut-outs of larger primates to drive away troops of rhesus macaques from its G20 summit venue.
