The tragic incident took place in the state of Odisha on Thursday, police announced on Saturday. Seventy-year-old Maya Murmu was in a ditch pumping water in the village of Raipal in the Mayurbhanj district when the wild elephant appeared out of nowhere. Authorities said the elephant had moved away from the Dalma Wildlife Refuge, almost 200km from Mayurbhanj. After being trampled, Murmu was taken to hospital where she succumbed to her injuries, according to local police Lopamudra Nayak at the Press Trust of India news agency. Local reports said that when family members gathered for the funeral and were in the middle of the final ceremonies for the woman, the same wild elephant appeared, lifted Murmu’s body from the funeral pyre and pressed it again. The incident shocked those present at the funeral, local media reported. Murmu’s family could only complete the final rites for her when the elephant left after a few hours. It remains unclear whether the elephant harmed anyone else at the funeral. Human-elephant conflicts are common in Odisha. Intensive mineral activity in the mineral-rich state has increased human intervention in animal habitats, increasing the chances of encounters between villagers and elephants. A worrying trend in the state was also the increase in the number of unnatural elephant deaths. At least 1,356 elephants have died in Odyssey since 2000-2001, according to data provided by the state’s chief wildlife guard, the IANS news agency reported. At least 42 elephant deaths were recorded in the state in just seven months from April to October last year. Many other cases of human-elephant collision have been reported from other parts of the country. In March of this year, another woman was killed in a wild elephant attack in a forest in the Bilaspur district of the central state of Chhattisgarh. Her eight-year-old grandson was injured while trying to flee the scene, police said at the time. In May, a 40-year-old woman was trampled to death by an elephant outside her home near Gudalur in the southern Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu.
