Wild elephants kill five people in Bangladesh

A family of five people were killed today when a herd of wild elephants rampaged through a village in south-eastern Bangladesh.

The dead, including two children, were asleep in their thatched hut when the elephants trampled them to death at Bashkhali village in Chittagong district, said police chief Zahirul Islam.

Islam said a herd of about 12 elephants had been foraging in a nearby forest when they approached the village, 136 miles south-east of national capital, Dhaka, and destroyed more than a dozen huts.

Villagers used fire-lit torches to scare the pachyderms away, he said.

It was not clear what caused the rampage. Several hundred elephants make their homes in Bangladesh’s tropical forests, but their habitat has been reduced in recent years due to human development.

That occasionally causes elephants to invade residential areas for food, according to a Bangladeshi wildlife expert.

Ainun Nishat, country representative of the IUCN-The World Conservation Union, said elephants sometimes wandered into residential areas in search of food, but usually did not attack “without a valid reason”.

“Maybe once the area was a source of food, or somebody from the localities had caused injuries to one of the elephants,” Nishat said, adding that elephants have “very sharp” memories.

He said elephants often became angry when they found homes or other buildings at the places once they used to roam.

About 30 to 40 wild elephants live in forests near the scene of today’s incident, Nishat said. The country has about 250 wild elephants in its forests, he said.

About three dozen people have been killed over the past few years by the wild elephants in the country’s northern Sherpur district, which is close to the forested border with India.

Residents in many Bangladeshi villages along its border with India use firecrackers at night and beat drums to scare away elephants, which have been known to attack villagers, damage crops and flatten trees.

A similar incident occurred last week in Malaysia, when wild elephants reportedly rampaged through a plantation district, trampling more than 1,000 banana and rubber trees.

At least four elephants believed to be foraging for food ventured out of a jungle on Friday and tore through a rural plantation in the northern state of Kedah, shocking villagers whose livelihood depends on the crops, The Star newspaper reported.