August 27, 2012

Tiger kills keeper in Germany



A tiger escaped its enclosure at Cologne Zoo in western Germany on Saturday and killed a female keeper before being shot dead by the zoo’s director, police said.
The tiger slipped through a passage between the enclosure and an adjacent storage building, where it fatally attacked the 43-year-old keeper, said police spokesman Stefan Kirchner.
“It appears the gate wasn’t properly shut,” Kirchner told the Associated Press.
The zoo was evacuated and a SWAT team was called in, police said. But before it arrived the zoo’s director managed to kill the tiger by climbing onto the storage building and shooting it through a skylight using a high-caliber rifle.
Kirchner said it was unlikely that members of the public had witnessed the incident.
“This is the darkest day of my life,” the zoo’s director, Theo Pagel, was quoted as saying by Cologne newspaper, Express.
The paper reported on its website that the Siberian tiger was a four-year-old male called Altai that came to Cologne Zoo from an animal park in England. In November it fathered three cubs with a seven-year-old Siberian tiger called Hanya, according to the zoo’s website.

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