An IAF veteran with experience in training target shooters and neutralizing wild animals and three marksmen from Junnar district trained under him have been deployed to tranquilize and capture or shoot and eliminate the tiger, which is proving to be a threat to human life in Shirur taluka.
Their publication comes one day later 13-year-old Rohan Bombay was killed in Shirur taluka On Sunday afternoon, the fifth such fatality resulting from human-leopard conflict occurred in Pune district this year. This is the second death in a tiger attack in the village of Bimbarked and the third in the region, in less than a month.
On the orders of the Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (PCCF) – the head of the Maharashtra forest department, the forest department has sought help from Chandrakant Mandlik, who retired from the Indian Air Force as a junior officer and is currently running his shooting and weapons training institute in Pune. The other three assigned to the task with him are his students – Vinod Sonavali, Navnath Phalke and Dhananjay Kokney – all from Junnar district. The trio brings an understanding of the local dynamics and terrain of the operation, officials said.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Mandlik, who runs the Rana Shooting Range and Weapons Training Institute in Pune’s Narhi area, said: “After my retirement from the Air Force, I ran an academy to train youth for competitive exams. For the past few years, I have been running a government-approved weapons training institute. The primary task given to us is to tranquilize and capture the tigers suspected of being behind the attacks. If this fails, we will shoot and eliminate them.” The animal is in accordance with the guidelines and we are working in coordination with forest officials and local villagers.
Forest officials said on Monday evening that their operation was briefly disrupted after villages closed some of the roads leading to them and burned tires, demanding a permanent solution to the human-cheetah conflict.
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(tags for translation) Pune Shirur tiger attacks
