A 53-year-old worker has been mauled to death by a jaguar while fixing a fence.
Dinalto Machado Lopes went missing at the farm where he worked on the morning of 24 April.
He was repairing a fence when the big cat sneaked up on him and attacked.
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The jaguar then tried to drag the victim’s body to a nearby river.
However, Machado’s corpse became snagged on some vines on the ground and the big cat apparently gave up and left it where it was.
Police spokesperson Cleomar Campos said the victim was found by a colleague about 984 feet (300 metres) from where he was fixing the fence.
The worker followed the tracks and came across Machado’s dead body near the Borges River in Tapurah, Mato Grosso State, Brazil.
The victim had scratches and injuries to his head.
A part of his hand had also been bitten off.
Campos said a jaguar cub had been spotted by the river earlier that week, suggesting the killer cat was the mother.
He stated: “Due to this fact, we can assume that it was an attack by a jaguar with a cub.”
Machado’s corpse was taken to the Legal Medical Institute (IML) in Cuiabá to undergo an autopsy to establish his exact cause of death, as reported by Need to Know.
There have been no further updates on whether the authorities have managed to track down the jaguar in question.
The police investigation into the worker’s death is ongoing.
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