The bear entered the small town of Wales on the shores of the Bering Strait on Tuesday and “chased several residents”, according to the first elements disclosed by the police of this US state in a press release.
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UA 24-year-old woman and her infant were killed by a polar bear in a remote village in Alaska, officials in the US state announced Wednesday, an extremely rare attack on a species threatened by climate change.
“The attack is said to have taken place in the village, close to the school” and “the animal was shot by a resident”, when it attacked the young woman Summer Miomik and her son Clyde, one-year-old Ongdowasruk, he said.
Police and special agents were to be sent to the village, home to about 150 people from the Inupiat tribe. But they are currently facing “bad weather” that is preventing them from going there, according to the press release.
“Historically, it’s very rare for a polar bear to kill a person anywhere in the Arctic,” Jeff York of the NGO Polar Bears International told AFP. “In the northern Arctic, the ice pack is thick in mid-January and it is rare for polar bears to emerge in the seals that normally hunt ice packs. ยป
Globally, twenty people were killed in a total of 73 polar bear attacks between 1870 and 2014, according to the NGO. According to Mr. York, the last fatal attack in Alaska was in 1990.
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