Bear’s teeth cut from skull

ONE of the British youths attacked by a polar bear in the Norwegian Arctic had to have its teeth removed from his skull, as the uninjured survivors prepared to return home.

Patrick Flinders, 16, from Jersey in the Channel Islands, suffered a fractured skull in the attack on Friday on Spitsbergen island, which killed 17-year-old Horatio Chapple.

“The bear attacked his head while he was trying to fight it off and bit into him, so the operation he had in Norway was to remove bone and some of the polar bear’s teeth from his skull,” his father Terry Flinders told BBC radio.

Flinders punched the 250-kilogramme polar bear on the nose in an attempt to fend it off, but he was smashed across the face and head by the animal, which also ripped his ear and damaged his eye.