Indonesian officials said villagers found the body of a missing Indonesian grandmother in the stomach of a python they killed over the weekend.
Jarah, who is customarily named only in Indonesia, went out to collect rubber Sunday morning in a forest in Jambi province on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Her husband became worried because she could not return home that night and asked him to inform the other villagers and report her missing.
A search party was organized that night to find the 54-year-old grandmother, but they found only her sandals, headscarf and jacket, and the tools she used to collect rubber at the time.
Search teams succeeded only a day later, on Monday, when they discovered a 22-foot-long (6.7-meter-long) python with a bulging stomach lying in the woods. The video was shared online shows the villagers killing the snake with a spear and beating its head.
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Villagers caught the snake and cut open its body. To their horror, they found Jahrah’s undigested remains intact in the python’s stomach.
“Later, his family reported him missing to the local authorities, and the search has been ongoing since then,” said Anto, the head of the local village. he said. “The snake was killed by local residents, and then its stomach was cut open. Everyone was shocked. It turned out that the woman we were looking for is in the belly of the snake.”
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Betara Jambi Superintendent of Police AKP S Harefa also shared similar details while talking to local media on Tuesday. CNN Indonesia informed.
“When we found it inside the snake, the victim’s body was not destroyed, meaning it was recently swallowed whole,” police said of the python, which was found near Betara village in Jambi province.
Although it is unclear how Jahrah was killed, Anto speculated that he may have been captured by the python’s jaws and slowly suffocated to death.
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According to Mary-Ruth Lowe, a former conservation and research officer at the Mandai Wildlife Group, although the python usually eats rats and other animals, the reptiles often change their diet as they grow in size.
talking to BBC“Once they get to a certain size, it’s almost like they don’t bother with the rats anymore because the calories aren’t worth it,” Low explained.
“In fact, they can grow larger as their prey grows,” Lowe added.
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Snake conservationist Nathan Rusli, director of the Indonesian Herpetofauna Foundation, suspects that the type of python that killed Jahra was a reticulated python, the only reptile species large enough to swallow a human that lives in Jambi province.
“They are constrictors, so what they do is curl their body around you. They will give you a death hug. You breathe in and your body shrinks, it tightens its grip and you can’t breathe,” Rusli told The Washington Post. “The snake’s upper and lower jaws are connected by ligaments and are very flexible. They can swallow prey larger than their heads.”
