A wild leopard injured six people after entering a school’s grounds on Sunday in the suburbs of Bangalore, Indian, according to S. Boralingaiah, police chief of Karnataka state's Davangere district.
The six-year-old male cat entered Vibgyor International school at 4:15 a.m., where surveillance footage shows it strolling around the premises.
After failed attempts to subdue the animal in the morning, it vanished until the mid-afternoon when it was spotted in a bush behind the school, the police chief said. Reports say officials had considered calling the search off as they couldn’t locate the animal for some time.
Forest department employees then forced the leopard back into the school where they locked it inside a bathroom, only for the cat to escape through a ventilation duct into the swimming pool complex, where the attacks took place.
School surveillance footage showed it flooring a man by the swimming pool, drawing blood, as he tried to scramble away over a fence.
Conservation scientist Sanjay Gubbi and forest department employee Benny Maurius were injured when they tried to corner the animal and tranquilize it.
Four others, including a local cameraperson, were treated for minor wounds in a local hospital.
The leopard was finally subdued in the evening.
"It was a long struggle to capture the leopard. Although it was injected with tranquilizers it could be captured only around 8:15 p.m. local time when the medication took full effect," a senior police official, S Boralingaiah, told reporters.
The captured animal has since been moved to a national park.
India has some 12,000 to 14,000 leopards, according to a study commissioned by the Wildlife Institute of India. The animals have been known to attack small children and commonly stray away from their forest habitats and into populated areas.
A leopard killed a five-year-old boy in the courtyard of his home in central India in 2014.
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