Amid renewed attacks, two wolves shot dead in Bahraich village in a span of 48 hours

In the second incident, reported from the same village on Saturday, another wolf allegedly carried away a year-old baby who was sleeping beside her mother at their home.

The wolf allegedly entered the house, snatched the baby in its jaws, and fled to a nearby sugarcane field. The mother raised an alarm upon realising what had happened, following which the neighbours rushed to the spot. Police and Forest Department officials were informed, and a search operation was launched. Using drone surveillance, the wolf was spotted and shot dead, officials said.

Later, the baby’s remains and clothes were also found in a nearby sugarcane field.

Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) Bahraich, Ram Singh Yadav, said the team in both cases acted on specific inputs about the animal’s movement. Godhiya village is located about three kilometres from the sites where the last two wolf attacks were reported, said Yadav.

On December 7, a wolf had allegedly carried away a four-month-old baby from his home in Mallahanpurwa village of Kaiserganj tehsil. The infant was sleeping beside his mother on a cot when the animal is said to have entered the house, picked up the child and escaped. A forest official said the mother noticed some movement and woke up, only to see the wolf running away. Later, the baby’s clothes and bloodstains were found nearly a kilometre away in a sugarcane field. This was the fourth alleged wolf attack in the area in the past 10 days.

Meanwhile, after the fresh wolf scare, the Forest Department has split the affected areas into several zones and teams have been spread out to put up cages, use thermal drones, set camera traps, place nets, and use other tools to track the animals.

The earlier wave of wolf attacks in Kaiserganj began on September 9, almost a year after a pack of animals created a reign of terror in the area. Since September, a killer pack of four wolves killed eight – six children and two adults – and left around 30 people injured.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath conducted an aerial survey of the affected region on September 27 and ordered that the wolves be safely captured and, if that failed, shot. After a sustained operation, the last member of the killer wolf pack was killed on November 15, bringing relief to the people, which turned out to be short-lived.