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Pilanesberg Game Reserve is South Africa’s fourth largest park and a popular tourist destination.
CNN —
A Spanish tourist was crushed to death by a herd of elephants in South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park after leaving his car to take close-up photographs of breeding elephants, local police said.
Police said the European man, who has not been named, is 43 and visited a game reserve in South Africa’s North West province in his own car on Sunday, said Sabata Mokwabone, a police spokesman for the province. He was accompanied by his fiancee and two other women, he said in a statement to CNN on Wednesday.
Spanish daily La Vanguardia reported that the tourist was Carlos Luna, from Zaragoza.
Pilanesberg Game Reserve is South Africa’s fourth-largest park and a popular tourist destination, and is home to more than 7,000 animals, according to its website.
According to police, the man and his passenger, who were sightseeing in the park, “saw three elephants with three calves” and “the man stopped his car, got out and approached to take photos,” but was attacked and killed by the herd.
The Spanish man “failed to heed warnings from his passenger and from the occupants of two other vehicles at the scene” before approaching the elephant, which was “feeding a short distance from the road”, the state’s tourism office said in a statement.
“An adult female elephant charged at the man, who tried to flee but unfortunately was unable to escape or avoid the elephant and the entire herd joined the elephant, trapping and trampling him to death,” the commission said.
The elephants then left the scene and did not attack anyone, he added.
“Eyewitnesses who observed the entire incident said that the female elephant who lunged and attacked may have done so in defense of her herd and her calf.”
Spanish newspapers quoted officials as saying plans were being made to repatriate the tourists’ bodies.
Elephant attacks are not uncommon in South Africa.
Authorities said at the time that a suspected poacher had been killed by an elephant in the northeast of Kruger National Park in 2019 and his body had been eaten by lions.
That same year, a security guard at a mine in the country’s Limpopo province was similarly crushed to death by an elephant.
Similar tragedies have occurred elsewhere in South Africa: Three months ago, an elderly American woman was killed when an elephant charged into a vehicle carrying tourists in Zambia’s largest national park.
The North West Tourism Board said it was “saddened” by the incident at Pilanesberg Park and urged tourists to “respect the distance between vehicles and animals and only disembark in specially designated areas”.
