Escaped tiger in Germany kills zookeeper
BERLIN -- A tiger escaped its enclosure at Cologne Zoo in western Germany Saturday and killed a female keeper before being shot dead by the zoo's director, police said.
The tiger slipped through a passage between the enclosure and an adjacent storage building, where it fatally attacked the 43-year-old keeper, said police spokesman Stefan Kirchner.
"It appears the gate wasn't properly shut," Kirchner said.
The zoo was evacuated and a SWAT team was called in, police said. But before it arrived, the zoo's director killed the tiger by climbing onto the storage building and shooting it through a skylight using a high-caliber rifle.
Kirchner said it was unlikely that members of the public had witnessed the attack.
"This is the darkest day of my life," the zoo's director, Theo Pagel, was quoted as saying by Cologne newspaper Express.
The paper said on its website that the Siberian tiger was a 4-year-old male called Altai that came to Cologne Zoo from an animal park in England.
In November, it fathered three cubs with a 7-year-old Siberian tiger called Hanya, according to the zoo's website.
Police said the zoo reopened after the attack, which occurred around noon, local time. However, a planned late-night opening of the zoo has been canceled.
Cologne Zoo is one of the oldest in Germany. It was founded in 1860 and houses about 10,000 animals from more than 700 different species.
-- AP
'Let somebody else have a chance' Hundreds of Long Island educators are double dipping, a term used to describe collecting both a salary and a pension. NewsdayTV's Shari Einhorn and Newsday investigative reporter Jim Baumbach report.
'Let somebody else have a chance' Hundreds of Long Island educators are double dipping, a term used to describe collecting both a salary and a pension. NewsdayTV's Shari Einhorn and Newsday investigative reporter Jim Baumbach report.
