Crocodile kills woman in Indonesia despite coworker’s attempt to pull her from animal’s jaws

A crocodile attacked and killed a woman as she worked on a palm oil plantation in central Indonesia, local police said, with her body later recovered from the animal’s clutches.

Indonesia is home to several species of crocodiles that regularly attack and kill humans.

The 44-year-old woman was working with a colleague in West Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo when the crocodile chased the pair, biting the victim on her left hand and dragging her into a ditch.

The woman’s colleague tried to pull her from the animal’s jaws but lost the fight, before running to alert police in the coastal district of Ketapang, police said.

“After a 90-minute search, the victim’s body was found,” local police chief Bagus Tri Baskoro said in a statement late Thursday.

He said women’s remains were discovered still in the crocodile’s grip “not far” from the location of the attack. The animal released her body when rescuers approached it, he added.

Borneo is split between Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia and is home to vast tracts of jungle hosting a kaleidoscope of rare animals.

Palm oil plantations and logging projects have in the past been criticized for encroaching on Borneo’s rainforest areas.

In August, a crocodile killed a 54-year-old woman as she bathed in a river on Indonesia’s Maluku islands. That same month, a 63-year-old tin miner was killed by a crocodile near a river on Bangka island in Sumatra.

In 2019, a scientist was dragged by a huge captive crocodile into its enclosure and killed on the island of Sulawesi.

In 2018, a mob in Indonesia’s easternmost region of Papua butchered nearly 300 crocodiles in revenge after a local man was killed by one of the reptiles.

Indonesia has also seen several deadly python attacks this year. In August, a woman was found dead by her daughter after being attacked by a python in central Indonesia.

In July, a woman was found dead inside the belly of a snake after it swallowed her whole in Siteba village, in South Sulawesi province.

The month before that, a woman was found dead inside the belly of a reticulated python in another district of South Sulawesi.