Angry elephant kills at least 20 people, including children, in India, authorities say

Indian wildlife officials are hunting a wild elephant blamed for killing at least 20 people and injuring 15 others in the forests of Jharkhand, villagers and officials said Tuesday.

The elephant, a lone bull, was reported to have been wreaking havoc for nine days starting in early January, creating panic in rural West Singhbhum district.

“We are trying to locate and rescue this violent wild elephant that killed so many people,” forest official Aditya Narayan told News, confirming the death toll of 20.

Among the dead were children and the elderly, as well as a professional elephant keeper, known as a mahout.

But after leaving a trail of destruction, it had not been seen since Friday, despite multiple patrols in the area.

Authorities said search teams, with the help of drones, are combing dense forests, including a national reserve in the neighboring state of Odisha.

Fear has led residents of more than 20 villages to abandon their farms or barricade themselves in their homes at night, elected village head Pratap Chachar told News.

“A police team, or an official forest vehicle, visits at night to provide essential help to the villagers,” Chachar said.

Hundreds of thousands of Indians are affected every year by elephants raiding crops.

Asian elephants are now restricted to only 15% of their original habitat.

These normally shy animals are increasingly coming into contact with humans due to rapid settlement expansion and increasing disturbance of forests, including mining operations.

As elephant habitats shrink, conflict between humans and wild elephants has increased: 629 people were killed by elephants across India in 2023-2024, according to parliamentary figures.

The elephants that pose the greatest danger to humans are often unruly bulls, solitary male animals enraged during “musth,” a period of intense sexual activity when testosterone levels soar.

A former forest official said the elephant was probably in shock and might have calmed down by now and rejoined its herd.

India is home to most of the world’s remaining wild Asian elephants, a species listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and increasingly threatened by shrinking habitat.

Last year, the Wildlife Institute of India released a new estimate putting the country’s wild elephant population at 22,446, a report that also warned of growing pressures on one of India’s most iconic animals.

last month, seven elephants were killed and a calf was injured when a high-speed passenger train collided with a herd crossing the tracks in the northeastern Indian state of Assam.

The country recently opened a elephant hospital in Mathura. The southern state of Tamil Nadu also launched an artificial intelligence and machine learning-based surveillance system aimed at helping prevent elephant deaths on railways.

Fatal elephant attacks have occurred in other parts of the world in recent months.

Last July, two women from the United Kingdom and New Zealand were killed by an elephant during a walking safari in Zambia.

In April 2025, officials from Kenya He said a 54-year-old man was killed by an elephant in the central part of the country.

In January of last year, a tourist was delicate by an elephant in South Africa’s famous Kruger Park.

That same month, Thai police said an elephant “stuck in panic” killed a Spanish tourist while bathing the animal in a sanctuary. The previous month, a 49-year-old woman was killed by an elephant in a national park in Loei province, northern Thailand.

In July 2024, a Spanish tourist trampled to death by elephants after he left his fiancée in the car to take photographs at another game reserve in South Africa.