Bengaluru City residents on edge as officials yet to trace leopard

Bengaluru: The search for the leopard which was spotted at an apartment complex in Bengaluru's Bannerghatta Road on Saturday, continued on Wednesday. The big cat has left the residents in the area spending sleepless nights and kept police and forest department officials on their toes. The efforts to capture it has so far failed.

Though forest department officials have set up camera traps and roped in drones to trace it, the leopard continues to evade detection. After exhausting all their efforts to trace it, officials do not rule out the possibility of the wild animal escaping into the Kalkere forest through the five-km vast open land behind the residential complex. However, they have not given up their efforts to catch it.

The CCTV camera footage accessed from the Prestige Song apartment showed the leopard roaming near one of the parking areas of the building early Saturday morning. The security guards and residents then immediately alerted the forest and police department officials. The officials initially suspected that the animal, which is believed to have strayed off from the nearby Bannerghatta National Park and entered the residential area, was hiding in the 10-acre land, next to the apartment. The video of the leopard has been doing the rounds on social media platforms since it was first sighted four days ago.

The fire and forest department officials have thoroughly combed the area without any trace of the intruder, giving rise to the speculation that it must have returned to the forest. Intrusion of wild animals into Bengaluru city is not new as they often stray into residential areas in search of food from nearby forest areas like Bannerghatta and Jarakabande Kaval.

A leopard was spotted in the ITC factory in Yelahanka, which was captured by forest officials and released into the Bannerghatta National Park within 24 hours recently. In February 2016, a leopard had entered a school in the Whitefield area.