The Man Lilling Leopards of Nagrakata Part 2

 This is a continuation of the last post on the leopards that have taken to killing humans in the Nagrakata area of the Dooars. That post can be read here. 

One of the tea gardens in the area where parts appear to be not maintained. According to locals, this sort of landscape harbours leopards

Some sort of change took place in 2019. That year, in this Nagrakata region, there were six major attacks by leopards, three of them led to deaths. The deaths were mainly of children; leopards are leery of attacking adults except when startled. There was a scare at this unnatural increase, but the Covid epidemic intervened, human movement ceased over large parts of the landscape and the scare died away.

But since October 2025, there has been a recurrence of deaths. Four deaths over a period of about twelve months have occurred and these deaths have some features that do not fit into the ‘normal’ encounters which as I said earlier mainly occur because of unexpected encounters. The first of these took place around August 2024 and since then, there have been recurring attacks, perhaps as many as a dozen which have led to four fatalities.

The first fatality was in October 2024, the next three in August and September, 2025. The fatal attacks have occurred in an area which is barely 10 square kilometres square. The victims are all children. All these are portents of something more sinister, or at least such are the conclusions that the locals as well as the forest Department officials are beginning to draw.

We visited the Nagrakata area where these fatalities took place on 29^th October, 2025. The day was cloudy and there was an occasional desultory shower, but the weather remained dry in the main. We first visited the Diana Range office at Luksan. The office is in its own compound the office building is surrounded by quarters for the forest staff. The forest surrounds it on three sides and we saw a pied hornbill fly past as we entered the office area.

The Ranger is Mr Ashesh Paul. Mr Paul is a veteran in the forest service and has worked in North Bengal forests for more than a decade. He was posted in The Terai area when Avijan and he met and they have struck up a friendship which has lasted. He is busy, conferring with colleagues and answering a stream of phone calls. Nevertheless, he makes time for us though our conversation is interrupted repeatedly by phone calls and short conferences with his staff. He is softspoken and intelligent. It is obvious that he has given much thought to the unexpected numbers of fatalities which have been occurring.

Mr Paul first makes the point that the numbers of leopards have increased substantially. He has obviously not done a scientific survey, but on the ground, it is obvious to an experienced officer like himself that there are more leopards in his range than before. He has some theories about why this is so. One reason, he feels is that leopards trapped anywhere in the Dooars are released either into the Gorumara National Park or to the adjacent Moraghat forest. As we know, the Diana Forest lies in between these forest ranges. The released leopards, finding no vacant space in these forests which already have resident leopards, find easy shelter and prey in the tea garden areas of Nagrakata. Another reason, he feels, is that the survival rate for cubs in the wild have increased. The reason for this is the decreased tendency to kill cubs found in the wild by the local population. Earlier, whenever they were encountered, they were killed by locals, but nowadays, thanks to relentless campaigning by the Forest Department and local NGOs, there is a much more tolerant attitude and usually these cubs are not harmed and are often reunited with their mothers. Whatever the reason, the increased numbers are obviously leading to increased numbers of human leopard encounters. He also has theories about the leopards that made the “kills”. The first two killed this year, he feels, were killed by the same leopard, possibly a female that had been spotted in the area several times before the attack. The other one, however, in his opinion was a male leopard and not the same one that was responsible for the first two kills.

The conversation has been interesting, but we realise that we are taking too much of his time and we take his leave. We have planned to meet the family of the victims and hear their stories and see the exact locations of the tragedies that have occurred. Our local contact is Ardhendu Raha. Ardhendu is a slight young man, maybe around forty years of age. He has intelligent eyes and a beard and is a local activist for a political party. He has many contacts in the local area and is an ideal guide for us as he knows the landscape intimately and has many contacts in the Banarhat area.  

We meet him at Banarhat Crossing, but before we start off, we decide to have lunch. A local small restaurant serves us an excellent meal, tasty but cheap and now, having taken care of our stomachs we are ready to go. We turn South from the Crossing and are soon passing tea gardens, the Gandrapara Tea Garden to our left and the Totapara Tea Garden to the right. We take a turn onto a narrow road beside a Masjid and enter the Angrabhasa village. This is a Muslim dominated village, typically Bengali style homes, roofed with tin sheets and arranged around a central courtyard. We alight near the house of Khalil Rahman. He is not at home; he is busy at the local market; in fact all the adult male members of this family are away. We are greeted by the relations of the boy who was killed, they bring plastic chairs for us to sit and a sizeable crowd gathers around us to tell us the story. They call the mother of the boy who sits opposite us and we hear the story.

This courtyard is surrounded by four houses, all relations of each other. Just a little away is the tea garden, and on the other side are agricultural fields, including a big field now planted with brinjal. Beside this a small stream runs, about 20 feet wide and at this time of the year, fairly full of water. Beyond the tea garden is the forest and we can see in the distance a trap that the Forest Department has laid to catch any leopard that wanders here.

Karimul Haque was just 12 years old. On the day of the incident, he went with a friend of his to bring a cow that had been tied up near the stream, about 500 meters away from their homestead. Here, adjacent to the stream is a patch of grassland that the cow was feasting on. It was around 5.30 PM, not yet dark, 27^th August, 2025. While his friend watched, he bent down to pull out the stake to which the cow had been tied. At this time, the leopard, a fairly large one, according to the witnesses, leaped on him from some bushes that grew adjacent and bore him away. The first bite was to his neck, which severed his neck vertebrae as the postmortem report later found and he was probably dead in seconds.

This is where the cow was tethered and the boy attacked 

The friend fled in terror and raised the alarm. As today, the menfolk were away at work, and only the womenfolk were home. They immediately gathered up whatever they could which would make a noise, household utensils and stirrers and whatever weapons they had on hand, (sickles etc) and a couple of torches and reached the spot, banging the utensils to make a noise to try and frighten the leopard away. When they reached the grassy patch, they saw that the leopard was carrying the boy in its jaws and was near the stream, a little further away where a small bridge used to be but was now broken. When the leopard saw the pursuers, it crossed the stream carrying the boy and entered a patch of scrub jungle on the opposite side. On being pursued here as well, it dropped the boy and disappeared into the bushes. The boy was found dead.

The leopard was standing near this stream with the boy, he subsequently crossed the stream, carrying the victim 

Since then, they are obviously living in terror. The women told us that they now fear leaving the homestead after dark and can hear the calls of the leopard still in the tea garden or in the scrub jungle almost every evening. They did hear such calls earlier as well, but no attacks ever occurred. They were used to living with leopards which occasionally took a duck or fowl, but human attacks were unknown.

The second victim lived in the Kalabari tea garden. We drove about 5 kilometres south to tea garden. This seemed to be a well-maintained tea garden. The tea bushes were well tended and the roads maintained. An ICDS center, a clinic and a canteen stood close to each other in this section. We saw a row of houses, each standing in a small patch of land which had trees and, in some houses, flowers and a patch of vegetables as well. The house we need to go to was here, we were told, but first we were taken to see where the body of the little boy had been retrieved. This was about 400 metres away in the middle of a patch of tea bushes. From this place which now had nothing to distinguish it from the surrounding bushes, we could see the same row of houses across the tea bushes.

Photo taken from the spot that the toddler was abandoned. The house where he lived can be seen in the background. Kalabari Tea Garden.

Ayub Nagarchi was just two and half years old. He lived with his widowed mother and three older siblings in a hut that stood in its own patch of land, protected by bamboo fencing. The gate led to a mud road about 15 feet wide which separated it from the tea bushes. His mother was cooking on the evening of the 18^th August, 2025. His two younger siblings were waiting for their mother to serve them dinner. Ayub had already been fed by his mother and he wandered out of the gate onto the road. This was something he often did, there were neighbours around and it had never felt unsafe. On this day too, there were people in a nearby shop and they were witness to the horrific sight of a leopard rushing out of the tee bushes and grabbing the child and disappearing into the bushes again.

Ayub's mother and two of his siblings 

This time there were many people nearby and all of them rushed to chase the leopard. The leopard carried him about 400 meters and abandoned the body and disappeared. The post mortem report noted that the neck vertebrae were fractured and the body had at least twelve cuts corresponding to leopard bite marks.

The attacks have not ceased; just two days prior, a leopard had attacked two adults, unprovoked. They were able to fight back and grappled with it, but it escaped after inflicting minor injuries.

 It was getting late and it was becoming dark. We did not fancy walking around the tea garden area after dark and decided that we would visit the third victim another day. In any case, the site was at quite a distance from the Kalabari garden. We dropped off Ardhendu at the Banarhat crossing and returned to Siliguri.

It seems obvious that at least one, and perhaps more leopards have become man killers, if not full-blown man eaters. Their favoured victims are young children and it is known man eating leopards prefer to attack old people and children in contrast to tigers who have no qualms in taking adults.

We plan to go back soon to gather more information and meet the relations of the third victim. How this problem is to be solved in anybody’s guess. The Forest Department is trapping leopards and even if they do trap the concerned leopard or leopard, their strategy of releasing these leopards is likely to cause them to either return to Nagrakata or perhaps terrorise some other populations. In the meanwhile, local populations have been advised to keep children indoors after 4 PM, to travel in groups and lighting arrangements have been made in some places in the hope of preventing leopards from coming too close to the populated areas. The local people live in fear of their lives.