About 36 hours after a leopard ventured into the Maruti Suzuki plant in Manesar, causing confusion and holding up production for several hours, the animal was finally tranquilised and rescued by officials from the forest department Friday afternoon. According to officials, the animal — an eight-year-old male weighing around 80 kg — wandered around the engine room through the night. It was not tempted by the goat left as bait in the room, nor did it venture into the two cages set up to capture it. It was finally rescued by officials from the forest department around 3 pm, after they adopted a more aggressive approach. “The engine room where it had sought shelter measures 4-5 acres and is full of machinery, which provided it with several hiding places. This made our task quite challenging. To tranquilise the animal, especially in an enclosed space, we needed a clear line of vision and the animal had to be stationary. If we had approached it without these two factors, there could have been injuries — to the animal or people,” said Vinod Kumar, Conservator of Forests (Wildlife), Gurgaon. On Friday morning, an alternate plan was hatched to capture the animal by restricting it to a small section of the engine room and cordoning off the rest. When the two teams of forest department officials got to work, the leopard ran under a platform on which some machinery was kept, and remained hidden there, officials said. “It remained stationary there, so we were able to tranquilise it. Once it fell unconscious, we roped in Maruti workers to help us retrieve it from under the iron machinery and platform by using tools to break them and pull it out,” said Kumar. The leopard was taken from the plant in Manesar to an undisclosed location for medical examination. “We will keep the animal under observation for some time even after it regains consciousness. If everything is found to be well, it will be released into the wild overnight,” Kumar said. The animal had first been spotted by members of the support staff at the plant, who keep an eye on the footage captured by CCTV cameras through the day. Around 3 am on Thursday, a camera captured it wandering around the engine room. The plant was subsequently evacuated and the forest department alerted. While the morning shift was called off as a team of forest officials tried to track down the animal on the 400-acre premises, workers in the afternoon shift were allowed in to do their work, with officials saying that the leopard had been restricted to the engine room and the rest of the area secured. About 100 police personnel had also been posted at the plant while the operation was underway, to prevent any inadvertent incident, Ravinder Kumar, PRO, Gurgaon Police, said.
