Indonesian authorities announced that the body of a missing woman was found inside a python.
The 54-year-old woman, Jahrah, reportedly left home Sunday morning for work as a tree tapper on a rubber plantation. After she did not return home that afternoon, her husband contacted authorities and set out to find her.
“During the search the team found a giant python, measuring 7 meters [22 feet] in length, which we suspected had preyed on the victim,” the local police later said in a statement. “The team captured the snake.”
Jahrah’s husband had discovered his missing wife’s sandals, jacket, headscarf, and knife scattered on the forest floor before the search party came upon the giant python near the village of Betara in Indonesia’s Jambi province, which is located on Sumatra Island.
The search team killed the reptile and sliced open its stomach. Inside, they discovered Jahrah’s dead body.
“The victim’s body was not destroyed when we found her inside the snake, meaning that she had only been recently swallowed whole,” the police said.
Cases such as this are relatively rare and occur approximately once a year.
“Most cases are cases of farmers working in rubber and cacao plantations in Sumatra and Sulawesi, most cases occur at night,” Indonesian snake expert Djoko Iskandar, a professor at Bandung Institute of Technology, told The Washington Post.
Only extremely long reptiles are able to successfully prey upon adult humans, Iskandar said. The smallest Indonesian python is known to have been involved in a fatal encounter measured over 18 feet long.
Nonvenomous pythons usually prefer not to attack humans. Instead, they prey upon smaller animals, which they hunt by gripping them in a nonvenomous bite before strangling them to death and then eating them.
Encounters between pythons and humans that end in death are becoming more common in Indonesia, according to snake experts.
In 2017, a 25-year-old villager on the Island of Sulawesi was discovered inside a 23-foot-long python. In 2018, a 54-year-old woman checking her crops was swallowed whole on Muna Island.
