A crocodile killed a woman who was swimming in a river in eastern Indonesia, police and locals said Wednesday, with villagers later recovering parts of her body from the butchered animal.
Halima Rahakbauw, 54, was swimming in a river in the village of Wali in the Maluku Islands after spending Tuesday morning looking for clams when the reptile struck.
Rahakbauw’s neighbor, Rustam Ilyas, said relatives and friends launched a search when she failed to return home.
After seeing a sandal and a body part in the river, the villagers reported the incident to the police who killed the reptile.
“The villagers had to cut open the crocodile’s stomach to remove some of the victim’s body parts,” a local police officer, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the case, told AFP on Wednesday.
“The crocodile was quite big, around four meters (13 feet) long,” neighbor Ilyas told AFP.
Neither the police nor the villagers could identify the species.
The deadly attack comes just days after police said there were human remains found inside a large crocodile suspected of killing a tourist in Australia.
Indonesia is home to several species of crocodiles that regularly attack humans.
On Sunday, a 63-year-old tin miner was killed by a crocodile near a river on the island of Bangka in Sumatra.
In 2018, a mob in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua slaughtered nearly 300 crocodiles in revenge after a local man was killed by one of the reptiles.
In 2019, a scientist was dragged by a huge captive crocodile into its enclosure and killed on the island of Sulawesi.
Agoes Rudianto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Tuesday’s deadly crocodile attack comes after a recent spate of deadly python attacks in the country. Last week, a woman found dead of her daughter after being attacked by a python in central Indonesia.
In July was a woman found dead in the stomach of a snake after it swallowed her whole in the village of Siteba, in the province of South Sulawesi.
In June a woman found dead inside the stomach of a reticulated python in another district of South Sulawesi.