Suspected 'marauder' leopard trapped in Aarey Colony

Mumbai, Oct 1 Maharashtra Forest Department has managed to trap a leopard in a cage in the Aarey Colony after over half a dozen attacks by the spotted big cats in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and its periphery, officials said on Friday.

The leopard was trapped in one of three cages placed at strategic locations in the Aarey Colony, but the officials are not certain if it the same suspected of creating havoc here in the past few days.

The female sub-adult was taken to the Leopard Rescue Centre in the park, Borivali, for treatment and observation, after it found inside the trap around 5 a.m.

The SGNP and Maharashtra Forest Department, which have accessed the CCTV footages of a couple of incidents recently and camera-trap images of the leopards, will match them with other evidence to ascertain if the same leopard has walked into the trap.

The SGNP, spread across around 103 square km, is the only national park in the world to be located with a metropolitan city limits, and had the highest leopard density with around four dozen spotted cats flourishing here.

Roaming inside the SGNP and its larger periphery, hugging three large and heavily populated areas of Mumbai Suburban District, Thane and Palghar, the leopards' hunt for food and prey often leads inside the human settlements, buildings, bungalow, slums, resulting in man-animal conflicts, with tragedies on both sides.