BEIJING (Reuters) – A rare tiger that attacked a villager and damaged a car in northeast China was caught after an hours-long pursuit by police and forestry officials and will be held for 45 days of observation, state media reported on Monday.
A resident in the village of Linhu in Heilongjiang province, which borders Russia, was sent to hospital for surgery and is in a stable condition after being attacked by the big cat on Friday, state broadcaster CGTN reported.
The wild Siberian tiger is a healthy male aged 2 to 3 years and weighing 225 kilograms, according to a Xinhua report posted on social media platform Weibo, citing local officials. The animal will be held for observation and quarantine purposes, it said.
A CGTN video showed the tiger running and knocking a woman down in a road before moving on, with a drone tracking the animal prowling through farmland. The tiger also smashed the window of a car as the occupants tried to escape. They were unharmed.
“It was too late for us to drive away, the tiger came straight at us and broke the window,” the car’s driver said in the CGTN video.
Footage showed the tranquilized animal later lying motionless in woodland after dark, surrounded by men with flashlights wrapping it in a plastic sheet.
The Siberian tiger, also known as the Amur tiger, is highly endangered, numbering just a few hundred, of which 20 are sometimes seen in two northeastern Chinese provinces, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.
(Reporting by Stella Qiu and Gabriel Crossley, Colin Qian and Tom Daly; Editing by Giles Elgood)
