With a five-year-old leopard in their house at Jayanagara in Tumakuru city, Vinutha and Vanajakshi were trapped in the bathroom for nearly five hours.
Outside the house, the police and Forest Department officials struggled to catch sight of the feline.
Cameras and mobile cameras mounted on sticks and stuck through the grills to get an inside view of the house were not of much help. The officials even attempted bursting crackers to bring the leopard out of hiding. Simultaneously, officials managed to break open the window of the bathroom and rescue the two women trapped there by 3 p.m.
A little later, veterinary doctors, Sujay, from Bannerghatta Biological Park, and Muralidhar, from Hassan, arrived to tranquillise the leopard. In the midst of this, thousands gathered around the house, blocking roads and further hindering rescue operations.
Eventually, doctors and teams with guns entered the house at 5 p.m. and spotted the leopard near the LPG cylinder of the kitchen. The kitchen door was closed, and within 45 minutes, the leopard was tranquilised after Dr. Sujay fired a dart at it from the window. It was then put in a cage. Officials said it would be kept under observation before a decision to release it in the forest was made.
“The leopard might have come in search of food (such as stray dogs) to the area. After the first rescue operation, it may have entered the house in fear. This is why it found a hiding space and did not move at all through it,” Ramalinge Gowda, Deputy Conservator of Forests, said.
Jayanagara is at the southern end of Tumakuru, and is close to thicket of shrubs and woods from where leopards have moved in from Devarayanadurga forests and other rocky outcrops in the past.
