A 58-year-old woman has died after being attacked by a bear in a remote mountainous area in southeastern Poland, the BBC reports.
The woman and her 27-year-old son were walking in a forest in the Bieszczady region, near Płoń, when the incident occurred. A firefighter at the scene said that, according to the woman’s son, he was talking to his mother on the phone when she screamed that a bear was nearby and then the phone went silent. The son called emergency services, but by the time they arrived, the woman was dead. The firefighter said the woman had extensive lacerations to her head.
The Bukowsko Commune has urged local residents to avoid the forest.
There are about 100 brown bears in Poland, most of which live in the sparsely populated Bieszczady region, but fatal encounters with bears are extremely rare. Previous fatal bear attack in Poland took place in 2014.
Paweł Giba, a spokesman for the local emergency services, said firefighters received a call from the woman’s son at around 10:30 a.m. local time.
Firefighters and police were immediately dispatched to the scene, but access was hampered by difficult terrain
and lack of phone coverage. A local police officer said the woman’s son was away at the time of the attack, but when he returned and saw his mother injured, he called the police. The victim’s son told TVN24 that the mother must have stepped on the bear as when they lay down they look like a pile of dirt. When a bear attacks, there is no escape, he added.
On the afternoon of April 23, medics and a prosecutor were also at the scene. Izabela Jurkowska-Hanus, a prosecutor from the Sanok prosecutor’s office responsible for the area, told television that there was currently no reason to believe that the cause of death could be anything other than a bear attack.
According to reports, the mother and son were searching for deer antlers in the forest. Wojciech Jankowski, a representative of the local forestry district, said that the bears have now woken up from their winter sleep and are approaching human settlements in search of food: “This was an unexpected encounter for both the bear and the human.”
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