A brown bear has been killed by an armed patrol after drone technology identified it as the animal that injured five people during a rampage in a town in northern Slovakia this month, the country’s environment ministry has said.
The environment minister, Tomáš Taraba, said the bear, which left a 49-year-old woman and a 72-year old man needing hospital treatment and three other victims including a 10-year-old girl with cuts and bruises, was shot dead late on Tuesday.
Local media cited the state nature conservancy as saying a drone had taken high-resolution photographs and videos of the bear, which special biometric software then compared with footage of the 17 March attack in the town of Liptovský Mikuláš.
“The detailed physiological comparison enabled the intervention team to accurately identify and successfully eliminate the problem bear,” the conservancy said, adding that this was the first time the technology had been used.
Video footage of the bear bounding through the town’s streets went viral and the town declared a state of emergency, asking people not to leave residential areas and dispatching six armed emergency patrols to track it down.
Mobile phone footage posted on social media showed the bear charging along a road and over a zebra crossing as terrified pedestrians scattered, then bounding across a green space and lunging at a man hurriedly climbing a fence to escape it.
Liptovský Mikuláš town hall said on its Facebook page that since then teams had been hunting the animal, estimated by local media to be three years old and weigh about 70kg, using drones fitted with advanced cameras and thermal imaging equipment.
The attack came a day after a 31-year-old Belarusian woman died when she fell into a deep ravine, apparently while trying to evade a brown bear in the Low Tatra mountain range near the same town.
Politicians from Slovakia’s populist nationalist government have called for the animals’ status on Slovakia’s endangered species list to be relaxed, arguing that with an estimated domestic population of 1,275, bears could now be hunted and culled.
The environment ministry has said that together with Romania, it will propose a reclassification of the species at EU level so as to allow selective culling.
Improved environmental protection in central and eastern Europe since the late 1980s has led to bears returning to their natural habitats across the Carpathian mountains, which stretch from Romania through western Ukraine to Slovakia and Poland.
Slovakia has had several bear attacks in recent years, including its first fatal assault in more than a century in 2021. A 57-year-old man was found in the central Banskô valley with his hip, neck and hand mauled and recent bear prints nearby.