Wolve attack in Uttar Pradesh. terror before sunset

IIt was a sunny winter afternoon in Mallahan Purwa village in Bahraich district of Uttar Pradesh, which shares its border with Nepal. There was more than an hour left for sunset when Star, a four-year-old boy, went to a nearby playground. Barely a few meters away, her grandmother Devmani was chatting with her neighbours. The buffaloes were in their sheds and the dogs were chasing each other on the road. Bike horns were sounding in the distance and tractors were speeding by. Suddenly a scream broke the pace. And the star was gone.

,The wolf dragged him to the sugarcane field and ate both his hands. (The wolf dragged her into the sugarcane fields about 3-4 km away and bit both her hands,” recalls the star’s mother Priyanka. By the time the villagers found her, both her hands were missing, her body was soaked in blood. Priyanka says there were at least 32 bite marks on her chest. Bleeding profusely, the child was taken to the nearest hospital – 50 km away – from where doctors referred her to Lucknow. He died before reaching the state capital, 130 km away.

The star, who breathed his last on November 28, is among the 11 people who were allegedly killed by wolves in Bahraich since September 9. The victims include nine children aged between two months and four years and an elderly couple above 75 years of age. More than 30 people have been injured.

Whenever Priyanka picks up a glass to drink water, her son’s last words echo in her ears. She says she only asked for water before closing her eyes due to pain.

“We named him Star because he was really Star,” says the child’s uncle Deepak Kumar, who works as a JCB driver with Star’s father in Karnataka. “Even at this age, he knew everyone and everything – PM, CM, phone numbers, addresses… you just need to ask him and he would answer within seconds. We never thought that our brightest star would meet such a tragic end,” says uncle.

Kumar, who had come home to attend his nephew’s cremation, has now decided to stay back in the village as he fears leaving his two children (one three-year-old, the other 15-month-old) alone until the killer wolves are trapped. However, Starr’s father went back to work, as he could not afford to leave his job.

There is fear in the villages

Even before the residents of Mallahan Purva became aware of the star’s death, another child was allegedly abducted and killed by a wolf on December 7. This time it was two month old Subhash. While Star was attacked in broad daylight, Subhash was abducted from his house at night.

“I was sleeping in the verandah and Subhash was inside. solid The room with his mother,” recalls Mangala, the child’s grandmother. “There was no door in the room,” she says, “I felt some movement and before I could get up from the bed, I saw a wolf carrying the child in its mouth. I screamed for help and ran towards him but by then he had disappeared into the darkness.” After a frantic search through the night, in the morning they found only a piece of the child’s skull and his green pants.

Subhash’s mother Kiran wanted to perform the last rites of her child with the same part of his body that was with her, but the police is currently conducting its postmortem. Due to fear of wolves, she has sent her four-year-old daughter to live with her maternal grandparents.

The family is barely able to manage two meals a day. Six of the nine members sleep either in the open or in huts. Now eight policemen are deployed to ensure their security. The police team is also making the villagers aware about staying safe. Subhash Singh, one of the constables in the patrolling group, says, “We are asking everyone to keep children indoors and if they go out, always have an adult with them.”

However, in the fields, where police vans are parked, children play alone. Their parents, daily wage labourers, are unable to keep an eye on them all the time.

operation wolf 2.0

This is not the first time that Bahraich has faced wolf attack. Last year, between March and October, seven children had lost their lives and 18 people were injured in animal attacks in Mahsi area, about 40 km from Mallahan Purva. This had forced the forest department to launch Operation Bhediya (Wolf in Hindi) in late 2024. Experts had identified a pack of six wolves as the attackers.

In a mission that lasted several weeks, forest officials set camera traps with soft toys soaked in children’s urine to create a false sense of human presence. They also released goats into the sugarcane fields as prey. Five of the six wolves were captured and sent to the zoo.

This year, after Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announced that animals attacking or killing children should not be spared, orders were passed to shoot at sight if officials failed to catch them.

Six wolves have been killed so far this year, says district forest officer (DFO) RS Yadav, who along with his team is searching on the banks of the Ghaghra river near Bhirgu Purwa village, 10 km from Mallahan Purwa. Here, wolves had killed 80-year-old Cheddan and his 75-year-old wife Manakiya on September 29, when the couple were sleeping in the verandah of their house.

“We can sense a change in the behavior of wolves, which have become smarter, fearless and more alert,” says Yadav. “They are no longer caught in camera traps or visible through drone surveillance.” He further added, “Earlier the attacks used to happen at night; now, they can happen at any time.” He points to a pugmark and says it belongs to the wolf. Forest rangers, drone operators and villagers rushed to the spot to get a glimpse.

Wolves are an endangered species and are classified as a Schedule-I animal under the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972. Apart from UP, wolves are majorly found in states like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, with small populations also in Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. “We have around 3,000 wolves in India,” says Semmaran Muthuramalingam, conservator of the Devipatan forest division. “Bahraich is a great habitat for this animal as the district lies on the floodplain of the Ghaghra river and is surrounded by dense grasslands, which provide water and natural prey.”

He says that apart from man-made factors, environmental factors such as floods and changes in the course of rivers have changed the landscape to a great extent. This has led to a lack of prey for wolves. “Now wolves turn to villages for their prey. The overgrown sugarcane fields located barely a few kilometers from the river have now become hiding places for wolves.”

“We are using the latest techniques to catch the alleged killer wolves, but the difference in their behavior is making it difficult for us,” said a forest department official, who is part of the search team.

Officials say the forest department has written a letter to the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in Dehradun, Uttarakhand, requesting the institute to conduct a “visual survey” and “habitat study” of the area to reduce man-animal conflict.

According to reports, before 2025 and 2024, wolf attacks had made headlines in UP in 2002, 1996-97 and even in the 1980s.

In 1997, following a series of wolf attacks the previous year, WII wildlife scientists and conservationists, Yadvendradev Jhala and Dinesh Kumar Sharma, published a study titled ‘Child Raising by Wolves in India’. It detailed that between March 17 and October 15, 1996, 75 children were attacked by wolves in 50 villages in eastern UP. The study found that the frequency of attacks was one every three days while one child was killed every fifth day. The average distance between consecutive attack locations was 13.28 km and the total area where the attacks occurred was 1,390 square km. The age of the victims ranged between four months to nine years.

WII scientist Salvador Lyngdoh says Bahraich and surrounding areas are not only home to wolves but also other animals like leopards, hyenas, jackals and wild dogs. “I have not been to the scene, but after studying the behavior of wolves for years, I can say that the animal in question is shy and cautious and quite afraid of humans. If it is wolves that are attacking humans, there must be a reason for it and it should be investigated to rule out other species,” he says.

Studies conducted in the past have also shown that in many areas where wolf attacks have occurred, children were more vulnerable than domestic livestock or wild prey. Most of the murders were related to some form of neglect by parents and most of the victims were from the poor section of the society. More than 50% of them had only their mothers to care for, says Satish Kumar, professor and chairman of the wildlife science department of Aligarh Muslim University.

Satish feels that even if the attacking animal is a wolf, chances are it will not be a pack but a lone wolf. “This was one of the observations I recorded during my previous visits to places where there were reports of wolf attacks from UP in both 1996 and 2002. Had it been a pack of wolves, the carcasses would not have been found in one piece. Moreover, for a pack, the attacks would have been very frequent, as each animal only got a limited amount of meat,” he says.

There are also those who suspect that the animals attacking the village residents are actually wolves. A forest department official says poverty is so severe in the area that people may claim they are wolves but in reality they could be some other animal. The Uttar Pradesh government has announced ₹5 lakh for each death due to wolf attack while ₹50,000 will be given to the injured.

house without doors

Forest guard Nankau in Mallahan Purva is doing double duty these days. He is helped by the villagers who burn firecrackers at night to keep the wolves away. Since most homes lack toilets, women are advised not to go out in the dark to defecate.

,back parallaxBa;mouthBaranbleating (They have a long back and a big face),” says Badi Devi, who claims to have seen wolves several times. He was last seen one morning when he attacked 5-year-old Anushka on the verandah of her house, where the family was sleeping. Her mother attacked the animal with a stick, after which she narrowly escaped. The girl still has scratches on her back and a wound on her chest.

Kiran does not want to go into depth as to what caused the death of her two-month-old son. All she knows is that children are being killed and it needs to stop. “Protect our children from whatever is killing them,” she says.

Edited by Sunalini Mathew