A Slovak tourist town declared an emergency on Monday after a bear attack left five people injured, including a child, just days after a woman died in a similar incident in the region.
They mark the latest bear attacks, which have been on the rise in the central European country.
The bear attack occurred on Sunday in the centre of Liptovsky Mikulas, a town nestled in the foothills of the Tatra mountains near popular ski resorts.
“The bear spent about 20 minutes in the town centre, attacked five people and retreated into the woods,” the town’s spokeswoman Viktoria Capcikova told AFP.
“Five people, including a 10-year-old child, suffered cuts and bites. The oldest individual treated in the hospital is a 72-year-old man,” she said.
The authorities on Monday called on residents not to venture outside residential areas, in particular in the evening and early morning hours as the bear was still on the loose.
Six patrol groups consisting of hunters, police officers and wildlife experts were trying to locate it around Liptovsky Mikulas, nearly 300 kilometres (200 miles) from Bratislava.
“They have at their disposal a drone with thermal vision, night vision, camera traps and service weapons,” Capcikova added.
On Friday, a woman from Belarus died following a separate bear attack in the Demanovska Dolina valley area in Liptovsky Mikulas district.
The 31-year-old woman fell to her death from a cliff after being chased by a bear, officials said.
– Attacks on the rise –
Bear attack have been on the rise in Slovakia, according to data from the environment ministry.
Last year there were 20 such incidents in Slovakia, up from only eight in 2021.
In December, near the northern city of Martin, a man came away from an encounter with a bear with bite wounds on his leg and scratches on his hands.
In 2021, a 57-year-old man was killed by a brown bear in central Slovakia in the country’s first confirmed deadly attack by a wild bear.
The attacks have fuelled lively debate on social media.
Slovak researchers say there has been no major uptick in the estimated bear population, saying it was at around 1,275 last year.
The Slovak environment ministry earlier this month published guidelines on the protective shooting of brown bears, allowing special teams to shoot any bear that presents a threat to humans.
Environment Minister Tomas Taraba on Friday blamed NGOs and the constitutional court for the death of the Belarusian woman chased off a cliff.
“According to a constitutional court ruling, shooting bears on a large scale is not allowed. So I congratulate the constitutional court. I hope you are happy with your work, this is also your doing,” he told reporters after the attack.
Also Friday, the ministry said it would, together with Romania, submit a proposal for the EU to reclassify the bear to a lower category of protected wildlife, which would allow more aggressive control of the bear population.
