A crocodile fatally attacked a woman bathing in a river in eastern Indonesia, police and local sources reported on Wednesday. Villagers later recovered parts of her body from the reptile after killing it.
Indonesia is known for its several crocodile species, which frequently attack and kill humans.
The victim, 54-year-old Halima Rahakbauw, was swimming in a river in Wali village on the Maluku Islands on Tuesday morning after searching for clams when the crocodile attacked.
Rahakbauw’s neighbor, Rustam Ilyas, said that when she did not return home, her relatives and friends began searching for her. After discovering a sandal and a body part in the river, the villagers alerted the police, who then killed the crocodile.
“The villagers had to cut open the crocodile’s belly to retrieve some of the victim’s body parts,” a local police officer, who wished to remain anonymous, told AFP on Wednesday.
“The crocodile was quite large, around four meters (12 feet) long,” said Ilyas. Neither the police nor villagers could determine the species of the crocodile.
This tragic incident follows a similar one on Sunday, where a 63-year-old tin miner was killed by a crocodile near a river on Bangka Island in Sumatra.
In 2018, a mob in Papua, Indonesia’s easternmost region, slaughtered nearly 300 crocodiles in retaliation after a local man was killed by one. In 2019, a scientist was dragged and killed by a large captive crocodile on the island of Sulawesi.
