A pregnant Frenchwoman who died while walking a dog in the woods during a deer hunt was killed by her partner’s dog and not the hunting hounds, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
Elisa Pilarski, 29, lost her life while out walking her partner’s pitbull, Curtis, in Retz forest northeast of Paris in November last year.
She was six months pregnant at the time.
A post-mortem showed that Pilarski died of bleeding after several dog bites to her limbs and head.
Suspicion initially fell on the hunting hounds, but DNA tests and veterinary examinations showed that the “sole involvement” of her partner’s dog in the attack, Amiens prosecutor Eric Boussuge said.
Boussuge said that the dog had been illegally imported into France from the Netherlands and trained to attack using techniques banned in France.
A source close to the investigation, who asked not to be named, told reporters that the pitbull’s DNA was found on Pilarski’s bites and that her DNA was also found on his leash.
Just before the attack Pilarski had telephoned her partner, Christophe Ellul, to tell him that she had come across threatening dogs and had difficulty keeping Curtis on his leash.
Ellul arrived on the scene about 45 minutes later to find her body in a ravine, next to Curtis and a pack of hounds.
Her clothes had been ripped off.
Ellul blamed the hounds for her death, but two veterinary reports concluded that only the pitbull’s jaw could have produced the marks on Pilarski’s body.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the