Mansur, an eight- (or nine-) year-old boy, was mauled to death by a Komodo dragon in east­ern Indo­ne­sia on 2 June. He was with his uncle mending fish­ing nets (or reliev­ing him­self in a bush) on Komodo Island – one of the larg­est in the Komodo nat­ional park – when the dragon att­acked him. It clawed his right leg, bit him in the stom­ach with its serr­ated teeth and shook him in an att­empt to break his neck. His uncle and other men pelted the creat­ure with rocks until it re­leased the boy, who was uncons­cious and bleed­ing heav­ily. Before a boat could be arr­anged to take him to a doctor, he had died of his injur­ies. Even if he had sur­vived the init­ial attack, say experts, he would have been killed by blood pois­on­ing from the bact­eria in the drag­on’s saliva.

The park, and the west­ern and north­ern coast­lines of neigh­bour­ing island of Flores, are the nat­ural hab­itat of the dragon, the world’s larg­est mon­itor liz­ard, which can grow up to 10ft (3m) and weigh as much as 300lb (136kg). It can sprint at 15mph (24km/h) and its usual prey are monk­eys, wild deer and rats. There are an est­im­ated 3,000 re­main­ing in the park and surr­ound­ing areas. While att­acks on humans are extrem­ely rare, a local story per­sists of a Swiss tour­ist who van­ished while on an exped­it­ion to photo­graph the creat­ures in the wild a decade ago. His bin­ocul­ars and torn cloth­ing were found in the jungle.

In 1974, an eld­erly Europ­ean tour­ist, Baron Rudolf von Reding Bib­er­egg, fell and in­jured his knee on a hiking trip on Komodo Island. His guide re­turned to a vill­age to seek help. All the search party found was the man’s hat, camera and a blood­stained shoe. In 2001, the hus­band of film star Sharon Stone was bitten on the foot by a Komodo in Los Ang­eles Zoo. Phil Bron­stein, 50, needed surg­ery to reatt­ach ten­dons and re­build his big toe, plus a mass­ive dose of anti­biot­ics to avert septi­cæm­ia.

[AFP] 4 June; D.Mail, 5 June 2007.