A tiger nicknamed the “man-eater of Champaran” that killed at least nine people has been killed by Indian police after an operation involving 200 people, authorities announced Sunday, Agerpres reported.

The big cat terrorized residents of the Valmiki Tiger Reserve in Champaran, eastern India, killing at least six people in the past month, including a woman and her eight-year-old son, on Saturday.

Even before these two latest deaths, authorities had declared the tiger — a three- or four-year-old male — a “man-eater,” meaning it could be killed. Previous attempts to neutralize the animal were unsuccessful.

Operation with policemen, snipers, foresters and elephants

“Two teams entered the forest with two elephants on Saturday afternoon and the third team waited where we thought the tiger would come out and fired (…), killing it there,” local police chief Kiran Kumar told AFP.

While the villagers were banging on tin cans, it took a team of eight snipers and about 200 forest department personnel nearly six hours to complete the operation, Kumar said.

Environmental activists blame the rapid expansion of human settlements in the forest zone and the main routes of wildlife such as elephants and tigers for increasing human-animal clashes in parts of India.

Between 2014 and 2019, nearly 225 people were killed by tigers in India, according to government data.

According to these statistics, more than 200 tigers were killed by poachers or electrocution between 2012 and 2018.

India is home to approximately 70% of the world’s tiger population, with 2,967 tigers living in the country in 2018.

(article photo: © Gs Rethees Kumar | Dreamstime.com)