Rampaging Elephant Kills 12

Hunters scoured thick forests Monday searching for a wild elephant that rampaged through villages on both sides of the India-Nepal border, trampling 12 people to death, police said.

The rogue elephant killed nine people in an Indian border village, and three more after crossing over into Nepalese territory, said Jogesh Burman, the wildlife minister of India's West Bengal state.

It was lunchtime Sunday at the Marapur tea plantation in India, near the border with Nepal, when the elephant entered the grounds and began trampling everything in its path, local police chief K. Jayaraman said. He said the elephant apparently came from a forest in Nepal, and swam across a river before reaching the plantation, about 380 miles north of Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal state.

The pachyderm's first victim was a woman worker who was eating lunch in an outdoor courtyard. Next, it trampled an 11-year-old boy, who was playing in a nearby field, followed by three more workers, two guards, 25 mud huts and three small police shacks, Jayaraman said.

After 30 minutes of havoc, villagers armed with swords and torches joined police and forest guards and chased the elephant away.

The state government declared the animal a rogue and ordered police and hunters to kill it, said Burman, the wildlife minister.

The elephant then apparently returned to Nepal, where it struck a few hours later in the border village of Bahun Dagi, 330 miles east of the Nepalese capital of Katmandu, Nepal's private Kantipur Radio reported.

The elephant attacked a 71-year-old villager, and then trampled a man and his wife, aged 21 and 19, who were trying to save the old man.

It was not known where the elephant went after the attack.

In similar attacks, 11 people were killed in the West Bengal area a year ago.