A Siberian tiger at a wildlife park near Beijing attacked and killed a man who had climbed into its enclosure thinking he found a shortcut down from the Great Wall, a park official said yesterday.
The 20-year-old man surnamed Guo had been hiking with two other people on the wall when the group decided to jump down to save time on the descent — unknowingly landing themselves in Badaling Wildlife World’s tiger enclosure.
The tiger pounced on Guo, knocking him down and clamping its jaws around his throat, said a wildlife officer who gave only his surname Wang.
Guo was killed instantly.
A park ranger who saw the attack chased the tiger in a jeep until it released the body, while the other two men escaped by clambering up a fence and out of the enclosure, Wang said.
“The men ignored all the warning signs and jumped over the protective fences,” Wang said.
The two men who escaped told police that they had seen signs around the enclosure cautioning of predatory animals but did not believe the warnings because they could not see any, the Beijing Times newspaper reported.
The Siberian tiger, also known as the Amur, Manchurian or Ussuri tiger, is one of the world’s rarest species. They are the largest of the big cats, weighing up to 226kg.
There are believed to be about 400 of the critically endangered animals in the wild.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema