Pilibhit: An eight-year-old boy was killed in an alleged leopard attack while playing outside his house in Tapar Purwa village under Singahi police station in Kheri district, forest officials said on Thursday.
Forest department data showed that 17 leopards had been trapped by forest teams in Kheri in the last nine months, while another leopard was captured in Tapar Purwa on Saturday.
Despite these efforts, seven people, mostly children, had died in leopard attacks in Kheri this year, officials said. The incident led to protests in the village, with residents initially preventing police from taking the body for postmortem. Nighasan sub-divisional magistrate Yudhveer Singh reached the spot with teams from two police stations and held talks with the villagers. The incident marked the second fatal big cat attack on a minor in Kheri in three days.
On Monday, a seven-year-old girl was allegedly dragged away by a leopard from the courtyard of her house around 7pm, and her body was found in a sugarcane field the next morning.