A 3.5-metre-long crocodile has mauled a grandmother to death in Indonesia, police have announced. Video footage shows authorities pulling her body from the beast’s belly.
Halima Rahakbauw, 54, was washing pots in a river in the village of Wali in the Maluku Islands. She had been looking for mussels on Tuesday morning when the reptile struck.
Rahakbauw’s neighbor, Rustam Ilyas, said relatives and friends launched a search when she did not come home.
After seeing a sandal and part of a leg in the river, villagers reported the incident to the police. The police saw the crocodile eating the woman’s body and shot the woman dead.
The predator was pulled out of the water and locals removed parts of Rahakbauw’s body from its stomach, then cut the animal into pieces and threw it away.
Local residents, assisted by police and military, pulled the animal from the water after it was shot dead
The victim is 54-year-old grandmother Halima Rahakbauw.
The huge beast is seen after being shot dead by police, who tied ropes around it and dragged it onto land
The dead reptile is inspected by locals in the water near the village of Wali in the Moluccas
Video footage shows residents, assisted by Bursel police officers and the Indonesian National Army, pulling the crocodile out of the water
The locals removed parts of Rahakbauw’s body from the animal’s stomach, cut it into pieces and threw it away
“The victim died a horrible death. His legs and hands were swallowed by a crocodile about 3.5 meters long,” Ilyas said.
Another eyewitness, who was driving on a nearby bridge at the time of the attack, told local media: ‘I saw someone swimming, but I couldn’t see his body, only his legs.
‘To be sure, I walked about 15 meters, got out of the car and I could clearly see that it was a human being eaten by a crocodile. After that, I reported it to the village official and local officials and contacted the community to help search.’
The man named Ali Rahangmetan described how he walked to the shoreline to check if the body part was human or animal. To his horror, he realized that the crocodile had a dead body in its mouth.
“It looks like there’s a crocodile walking around carrying a corpse,” he said. “The features of the person are unknown, both the sex and the head are no longer visible, only the legs and the intestines are visible.”
Shocked locals gather around the crocodile after hearing the news that it attacked Rahakbauw
Video shows local residents and officials dragging the animal’s carcass forward to cut it open
At the same time, villagers began to worry about Rahakbauw’s whereabouts.
Her relative, Jamia Seknun, said they had seen her earlier that morning walking with a bucket in her hands, which she normally uses to collect shellfish.
They found out that the victim must have been Rahakbauw. This was confirmed when her body parts were removed from the stomach of the dead crocodile and examined.
Video footage shows residents, assisted by Bursel police officers and the Indonesian military, pulling the crocodile out of the water and then laying it down to be dissected.
“The villagers had to cut open the crocodile’s belly to remove some of the victim’s body parts,” a local police officer said.
The body of the crocodile after it was shot by the police. It was then pulled out of the water and cut open
The river where Rahakbauw was searching for mussels when she was bitten to death
Neither the police nor the villagers could identify the species of the crocodile. Indonesia is home to several species of crocodiles that regularly attack and kill people.
A 63-year-old tin miner was killed by a crocodile near a river on Bangka Island in Sumatra on Sunday.
In 2018, a mob in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua slaughtered nearly 300 crocodiles in revenge after a local man was killed by one of the reptiles.
In 2019, a scientist was dragged into his enclosure and killed by a huge captive crocodile on the island of Sulawesi.