A 16-feet-long gharial, which had terrorised farmers in Rohtas district for the past 10 days after entering a canal connected to the Sone river, was rescued on Wednesday night.

Gharial is also known as gavial or fish-eating crocodilian, and is distinguished by its exceptionally long and narrow snout. It is found in the rivers of the Indian subcontinent.A team of forest department personnel and locals rescued the reptile from the canal at Sayyed Bigha village under Nasriganj block in the district.

It took more than three hours to catch and drag the gharial out of the canal with the help of nets, bamboo poles and ropes. The locals heaved a sigh of relief as they had stopped venturing to their farms located along several kilometres of the canal in the ongoing Kharif season. They had first spotted the gharial on August 22.

There had been several unsuccessful attempts to apprehend the wandering reptile. Once it was trapped in a net, but managed to cut it and escape. “Rescuing this gharial was a challenging task due to its sheer size and weight. It is a fully-grown male, around 16-feet-long and weighs over five quintals.

It seems to have strayed from the Gandak river via the Ganga to Sone and then to this canal. The presence of water in the canal made it very powerful,” Rohtas DFO Manish Kumar Verma told The Telegraph on Thursday. “Besides, the forest division in Rohtas had no prior experience of rescuing a crocodile or gharial,” Verma added.

Another big problem that the forest officials faced while rescuing the gharial was the crowd of thousands of people that would assemble. They made so much noise that the reptile would often dive and vanish underwater.

“After the successful rescue, the crowd went berserk, trying to click selfies with it. We had a tough time controlling them. They also pelted stones on us. We do not even know why they did this,” the Rohtas DFO shared with this newspaper. Meanwhile, the gharial is kept tied at the forest department premises at Dehri-on-Sone in Rohtas and the officials are awaiting further instructions from their headquarters. It could be possibly released back into the Ganga or the Gandak.