A grandmother was tragically killed by a crocodile while washing pots in a river, with the creature severing almost all of her limbs. Halima Rahakbauw, 54, was washing pots in a river in Wali village on the Maluku islands after spending Tuesday morning gathering clams when the crocodile attacked.
According to her neighbor, Rustam Ilyas, family and friends started searching for her when she didn’t come back home. After spotting a sandal and a portion of a leg in the river, villagers alerted the police, who found the crocodile eating the woman’s body. The cops then shot the crocodile but Rahakbauw was already eaten alive by the reptile by then.
Horrifying Crocodile Attack
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The predator was removed from the water, and locals retrieved parts of Rahakbauw’s body from its stomach before dismembering the crocodile and disposing of its remains. “The victim died horribly, their legs and hands were swallowed by a crocodile that was about 12ft long,” Ilyas said.
Another witness, who was driving across a nearby bridge during the attack, told local media: “I saw someone swimming, but I couldn’t see their body, only their legs.
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“To make sure, I went about 15 metres, got out of the car and after I saw clearly that it was a human being eaten by a crocodile, after that I reported it to the Village Official and local officials and contacted the community to help search.”
Ali Rahangmetan recounted walking toward the shoreline to investigate whether the body part was human or animal. To his shock, he saw that the crocodile had a dead body in its jaws.
“It looks like a crocodile is walking, carrying a corpse,’ he said. ‘The characteristics of the person are unknown, both the gender and the head are no longer visible, only the legs and intestines are visible.”
Chilling Experience for Witnesses
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Meanwhile, villagers started raising concerns about Rahakbauw’s absence. Her relative, Jamia Seknun, said that they had seen her earlier that morning carrying a bucket she typically used for gathering shellfish.
It became evident that the victim was Rahakbauw, a fact confirmed when her body parts were retrieved from the crocodile’s stomach and examined.
Video footage shows residents, with help from Bursel Police officers and the Indonesian National Army, pulling out the crocodile from the water before laying it for dissection.
“The villagers had to cut open the crocodile’s belly to remove some of the victim’s body parts,” a local police officer said.
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Neither the police nor the villagers were able to identify the species of the crocodile. Indonesia is home to various crocodile species that frequently attack and kill humans.
On Sunday, a 63-year-old tin miner was killed by a crocodile near a river on Bangka Island in Sumatra. In 2018, a group in Indonesia’s remote Papua region slaughtered nearly 300 crocodiles in retaliation after a local man was killed by one of the reptiles.
In 2019, a scientist was dragged into its enclosure and killed by a large captive crocodile on the island of Sulawesi.
