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In a strange incident, an elephant killed two people 14 years after killing two other members of the same family. The shocking part is that the family had relocated 17 kilometres away, and the beast still managed to find them. According to a report by Kathmandu Post, Dhurbe trampled Shanichara Bote's father and mother, Budhiram and Jharali, on Dec 16, 2012, near the Chitwan National Park. The danger posed by the rogue elephant forced the family to shift to Jagatpur after crossing two rivers. However, the animal found its way to their new home on Saturday (July 4), broke in and killed Bote's 25-year-old daughter-in-law and four-year-old grandson.

Chitwan National Park is the country's first protected area, and Dhurbe's violent antics in the region were known to the officials since it first killed a human in 2010. Yet, they failed to take relevant action to protect those living in the vicinity. The elephant has killed 25 people since then, including four from Bote's family alone. He told the outlet that the fear of the creature led them to sell everything and move to Jagatpur. "We believed that moving across the major rivers would keep us safe. But after all these years, the exact same elephant found us again, raided our home, and took my daughter-in-law and my little grandson," he said.

On the night of the incident, Bote's wife felt something pounding on the wall. She went out, after which the mud walls fell, and her daughter-in-law came out with her son. The elephant caught hold of them. Bote's wife scared it away with fire on dry thatch, which burned down their entire home.

What turned the elephant rogue?

Conservatives say Dhurbe went rogue after being aggressively pushed out of the herd by dominant males while still young. He turned into a lone wanderer and hostile entity who started seeing human settlements as his grounds to get food. Abinash Thapa Magar, information officer and conservation official at Chitwan National Park, told the outlet that they have been monitoring Dhurbe through a satellite tracking collar, and data logs show that he was near the site of the incident on Saturday night.

Dhurbe has also killed two separate military personnel deployed for counter-poaching and park security duties. After the elephant killed Bote's parents in 2012, a high-level emergency security meeting issued a directive to kill the marauding elephant. They hunted him down and wounded him, but he managed to escape. It was assumed for four years that he had died, but he re-emerged in 2016. A second collar was fitted in 2020, and then again in 2023. But it transmits data at one-hour intervals.