A video shot by an eyewitness shows several men throwing stones at the leopard.
A man-animal conflict ended with a leopard being brutally killed by a mob in a Karnataka village on Wednesday in front of a forest officer. The villagers surrounded and killed the leopard with sticks in Kurubarahalli village of Chitradurga district, some 200 km from state capital Bengaluru. The incident was captured on video.
The leopard had attacked two locals in the village's pomegranate garden in the last two days. The villagers, furious at the attack, had since been on a hunt for the big cat to avoid a repeat.
The mob found the leopard on Wednesday perched atop a tree. A video shot by an eyewitness shows several men throwing stones at the animal, even as officials, vastly outnumbered by the villagers, attempted to stop them.
Finally, the leopard jumped down from the tree and was seen chasing one of the villagers. The mob went after the animal and savagely killed it with huge wooden sticks.
A similarly gruesome incident took place in Assam in May, where villagers had killed a leopard, gouged its eyes out and chopped off the paws after, they said, the animal had critically injured a man in the area. They had kept the body of the leopard hanging for days after the incident.