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Escaped Tiger in Tbilisi Killed Man Before Being Caught and Put Down Tiger That Fled Flooded Georgia Zoo Is Killed After Mauling a Man
(about 11 hours later)
A tiger that escaped from the Tbilisi Zoo during flooding in the Georgian capital killed a man before being captured and killed, news agencies reported on Wednesday. MOSCOW — A white tiger that had survived this weekend’s torrential flooding killed a man on Wednesday and was shot and killed itself, putting a horrifying end to a thoroughly depressing and occasionally bizarre few days for residents in Tbilisi, Georgia.
Residents in Tbilisi were warned on Sunday to keep off the streets because of fears that they were at risk of being mauled by lions, tigers, bears and other beasts that were roaming the city after torrential rains allowed the animals to leave their enclosures at the zoo. At least 19 people died in the deluge, which decimated the city zoo, a beloved institution that has become the most vivid symbol of the tragedy.
Georgian authorities have since been scrambling to contain the beasts. Hundreds of animals drowned or were killed, including six wolves found on the grounds of a children’s hospital, a bear and a hyena. An African penguin reportedly managed to survive by swimming more than 35 miles to the border with Azerbaijan before it was captured on Wednesday. Six people remained missing on Wednesday and damage from the flooding was estimated at $45 million. Among the dead were three workers at the zoo, which lost more than 300 of its 600 animals, including bears, tigers, lions, reptiles and birds, said Mzia Sharashidze, a spokeswoman for the zoo reached by telephone.
The zoo had said on Tuesday that all of the missing lions and tigers had been found dead, with one jaguar unaccounted for. Then came news reports that the tiger, which had been hiding in a warehouse, had killed a man near the city’s central square. Swollen by heavy rains, the Vere River, which flows through the heart of this city of more than one million, burst its banks late Saturday night, sending a torrential wave down the hills overlooking the zoo and other flood-prone areas of Tbilisi.
The Interior Ministry initially said the victim had been killed by a lion, Agence France-Presse reported, and mobilized special forces to find the animal. As the waters rose, residents from nearby high-rises posted pictures on social media and said that people trapped in the flood area were using flashlights to signal for help.
Nino Giorgobiani, a spokesman for the ministry, later corrected that assessment and identified the animal as a tiger, the agency said. “It has been liquidated,” she was quoted as saying. “People in nearby houses could hear others screaming for help, please save us,” Zaza Shatirishvili, a literary critic and university professor, said in a telephone interview. “But they could not do anything. There was no light.”
Witnesses to the mauling told the local news media that they had seen a white tiger attack a man, the agency said. “It was a white tiger, a big one,” a witness told the Imedi channel, according to the agency. “It attacked a man; it seized him by the throat.” Many of the animals whose enclosures were located on the hillside, like elephants and zebras, survived, Ms. Sharashidze said. The worst affected were the predators, the lions, tigers and bears that lived in the basin of the valley.
At least 17 people have been killed in the flooding, according to news agencies, including three zookeepers. When some of those animals swam out of their enclosures and sought higher ground, many were shot by the police, Ms. Sharashidze said, though she could not say how many.
The surreal scenes in Tbilisi, including of residents herding a hippopotamus along a muddy street and of animal corpses scattered amid the debris of damaged vehicles and buildings, have captured global attention as Georgia struggles to come to terms with destruction wrought by the flooding. “This is what happens when it is the question of an animal life or a human life,” she said by telephone. “For us it was a really big tragedy,” she continued. “They were like children for our zookeepers, they had nursed many of them from childhood.”
Some residents have expressed anger at the killing of animals, an action that the authorities said was necessary to protect lives. As the floodwaters receded on Sunday morning, surreal scenes were revealed in the capital: a bear perched on a second-story windowsill, a crocodile lurking next to cars on a washed-out road and a hippopotamus grazing from a tree.
The police fanned out to tranquilize or, citing security concerns, kill the escaped animals. On Monday, Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili announced that the police had accounted for all the animals that posed a threat to humans. After the tiger attack on Wednesday, he apologized, saying he had been misled by officials at the zoo, and said patrols would continue.
Levan Butkhuzi, the editor in chief of National Geographic Georgia and a close friend of the zoo director, Zurab Gurielidze, said he rushed to the scene at 2 a.m. and said the zoo looked as if it had been hit “by a tsunami.” The zoo was covered by more than 12 feet of water, he said, and Mr. Gurielidze was on the second story of a building, trapped by the floodwaters.
In the following days, much of the stress for tallying the missing animals and coordinating the search has fallen on the shoulders of Mr. Gurielidze, who on Wednesday announced that he was responsible for telling the police that all the animals were accounted for.
“He had to coordinate all this, a guy who barely survived, and when he saw that his staff had died in front of his eyes, and the animals had died in front of his eyes, and he was obliged to coordinate everything,” Mr. Butkhuzi said in a telephone interview. “That’s really beyond the capacity of any person.”
Local news outlets reported Wednesday that an African penguin had appeared on Georgia’s border with Azerbaijan, apparently having swum more than 30 miles downstream from the zoo. Ms. Sharashidze said that zoo workers had searched for the penguin but had not been able to find it.
Since Sunday, hundreds of residents have volunteered to help dig the city out from under the mud and debris left by the flood. “I have not seen a response from civil society like this here for many years,” said Mr. Shatirishvili, the literary critic.
It was one of those volunteers, a 43-year old worker at a local warehouse, who was attacked by the tiger on Wednesday when he entered the building. Georgian television showed footage of men with automatic rifles running toward the warehouse. Shots rang out, and the dead tiger was carried out on a metal stretcher. The worker later died in the hospital of wounds to his throat.
“We wanted to tranquilize the tiger, but it was very aggressive and was attacking,” Vakhtang Gomelauri, Georgia’s interior minister, told television journalists at the scene of the mauling. “So unfortunately, we had to kill the tiger.”