A tusker, suspected to have killed 12 persons in four different districts of Jharkhand, trampled four more persons on Tuesday near the capital Ranchi.

Divisional forest officer of Ranchi, Shrikant Verma, said that going by the appearance and descriptions shared by forest officials of other districts, it appears to be the same tusker which had killed persons in Ramgarh, Hazaribagh, Latehar and Lohardaga.

“The Lohardaga forest officials drove away the elephant using the help of a team from Bengal’s Bankura to the forest and it crossed over through the dense forest to the adjacent block Itki in Ranchi district, around 30km from Ranchi city on Tuesday,” said Verma.

The tusker killed an elderly woman who had gone to worship it in the morning at Jargaon village and killed two other middle-aged persons in Boriya village and trampled to death a 35-year-old person who had tried to throw stones at the elephant hiding in a paddy field at Chukbura village in the afternoon.

“It was on our request that the district administration imposed Section 144 of CrPC in the entire block to prevent crowd gathering near the elephant which might lead to more casualties. We have constituted a 25-member team comprising experts from Bengal and also from the neighbouring forest of Khunti district and our own Ranchi unit and try to drive away the tusker,” said Verma.

Section 144 of CrPC prohibits assembly of more than five persons at one place. Forest teams and Ranchi district administration teams are using microphones to caution villagers against coming out of their houses at night.

The Ranchi forest official also informed that the principal chief conservator of forest (wildlife) Shashikar Samanta has constituted a team of forest officials comprising divisions affected by the tusker to determine if it is the same elephant which had led to all the casualties.

After the identification, the wildlife warden will take a decision on whether it has to be tranquillised or not.

Man-elephant conflicts have spiked in Jharkhand with reports stating that 133 people have died in jumbo attacks in 2021-22, a steep climb from 84 in 2020-21.

The Union ministry of environment, forest and climate, in reply to an RTI application, recently stated that 462 people have died in man-elephant conflicts in five years since 2017 in Jharkhand, including 133 in 2021-22.