PIMPRI CHINCHWAD : A mysterious animal has both terrorized and confused residents of Dapodi village, in Daund taluka.Some suspect the animal to be a leopard, while others believe it is a hyena. The forest department has yet to take a call on this matter and has installed a cage to trap the animal, which has injured 12 people..Kailas Pawar (35), a resident of the village, has sustained major head injuries — he received 45 stitches at Sassoon hospital in Pune. All the other injured received treatment at a local government hospital. They are mostly workers engaged in cutting sugar cane or at jaggery-making units. All of them hail from outside the state.“The attack occurred between midnight on Sunday and 5am on Monday. Most of the people stay in small huts. As the nights have been warm, most people have been sleeping outside their houses. That’s how they were targeted by the animal,” Nanda Bhandvalkar, sarpanch of Dapodi village, told TOI on Wednesday. “We feel it is a leopard as they are found in large numbers near the adjacent village of Pargaon. In fact, a leopard was spotted in the nearby Bori Pardhi village yesterday,” she added.“We conducted a panchnama at the sites. We found pugmarks of an animal on a brick at a kiln near the site of the attack on Monday evening,” forest guard Ankush Kharat said.“We have installed a cage to catch the elusive animal. We showed the injured people photographs of leopards, hyenas and even foxes, but they could not identify it. They only said that the animal was larger than a dog,” M N Hazare, range forest officer of Daund taluka, told TOI. “Leopards normally attacks their prey and drag them, but that has not happened here. A hyena does not attack a people sleeping in groups. So we are not able to ascertain which animal attacked so many people,” Hazare said.“This is flat terrain. There is a jungle along Bhima river, located 10-12km away. We don’t think a leopard would have come this far away,” Hazare added.The department has spread awareness among the villagers. We have advised the people not to sleep in the open, to carry torches while moving at night, to move only in groups and play loud music on their cellphones,” Hazare said.

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