- By Rob Cameron
- BBC News, Prague
Updated 18 minutes ago
The bear was captured on video running along streets in a town in northern Slovakia on 17 March
A brown bear that injured five people during a rampage in a Slovak town has been shot dead, the country’s environment minister says.
Video footage of the bear bounding through the streets of Liptovsky Mikulas on 17 March went viral.
After 10 days trying to track down the brown bear, authorities say it was shot dead in a local forest on Tuesday.
The Slovak government now wants greater freedom to reduce the bear population by selective culls.
A drone and biometric technology were used to identify the bear, Environment Minister Tomas Taraba said in a post on Facebook, thanking all those who were involved in the operation.
A state of alert with local police patrols was declared in districts across the region last week as a preventative measure against similar attacks.
Not everyone was convinced the right bear had been shot as it soon emerged that the bear that had been shot was a female weighing about 70kg (11 stone). “You don’t need high-end biometrics to realize that this shooting had nothing to do with the 100kg male they were looking for,” said Michal Wiezik, a Slovak member of the European Parliament.
The brown bear had been captured on numerous photos and videos as it ran through the streets of the northern Slovak town earlier this month.
One video showed the bear swiping at a man on a pavement. Five people, including a 10-year-old girl, were injured, and two were taken to hospital with gashes and scratches.
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Watch: Videos on social media showed a large bear bounding down the pavement before lunging at a man
One woman told a local paper she had been left traumatized by the attack.
Some members of Slovakia’s populist nationalist government said the incident proved the need to loosen EU environmental protections on wildlife that prevent animals such as bears and wolves from being hunted.
“This is a case where a bear has brutally attacked people. One person almost lost an eye,” Rudolf Huliak, an MP for the right-wing Slovak National Party – which is in charge of the Environment Ministry – told local media immediately after the incident.
Mr Huliak called for “a firm solution to the excessive number of bears”.
The ministry plans – together with Romania – to appeal to EU colleagues to reclassify bears to allow selective culling.
Better environmental protection in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of communism in 1989 has meant bears have returned to their natural habitats across the Carpathian mountain range, which stretches up from Romania through western Ukraine and on to Slovakia and Poland.
Researchers, however, say there has been no explosion in Slovakia’s estimated bear population, which they say remains stable at around 1,275.
