Two killed, including tourist, in Kenyan hippo attack
Six people have been killed by hippos at Lake Naivasha this year. Photo: Getty
A tourist has died and other has been injured in Kenya after being attacked by a hippo on the shores of Lake Naivasha.
A Chinese national, who was taking photographs, was pronounced dead on arrival at the Naivasha District Hospital, while another tourist survived the attack on Saturday evening, the Kenya Wildlife Service said.
“We are tracking the hippo,” it said on Twitter on Sunday.
The agency named the dead man as Chang Ming Chuang, 66, and the survivor as Wu Peng Te, 62.
The Chinese embassy did not immediately respond to a call for comment.
Mr Chang’s death occurred within hours of another fatal hippo attack on a Kenyan fisherman just a few kilometres away, a police official said.
“The man was bitten on the chest and his injuries were serious and he died minutes after he was retrieved from the lake,” Rift Valley Head of Criminal investigations Gideon Kibunja told the Associated Press of the fisherman attack.
The deaths brought to six the number of people who have been killed by hippos around Lake Naivasha so far this year.
Wildlife service spokesman Paul Udoto told the AP the circumstances of the attacks on the tourists were not clear.
Mr Udoto said attacks on tourists were rare because they are usually protected by guides.
He said hippos and lone buffalos pose the greatest danger to humans and there have been many attacks in which civilians, and even rangers, have lost their lives.
Kenyan newspaper The Star on Sunday quoted the head of a boat owners’ association in Navaisha as saying that higher than normal water levels were causing hippos to wander from the lake on to nearby farms and hotel properties searching for pasture.
Naivasha is a city on the lake 90km northwest of the capital, Nairobi.
After a severe drought last year, Kenya had several months of heavy rains earlier this year that caused serious flooding, including around Lake Naivasha.
Tourism is one of the country’s main sources of foreign exchange and nearly 1.5 million tourists visited Kenya last year, according to the tourism ministry.
-with agencies