A young girl escaped from the jaws of a massive crocodile by hitting and scratching at its nose and face after it attacked her while she was swimming in a river.
The 9-year-old girl was swimming in the Limpopo River in the southern Mozambique province of Gaza when she was seized.
"The crocodile grabbed me and dragged me so I hit it and scratched its nose [snout]. Then the crocodile immediately released me and threw me," she told state broadcaster Radio Mozambique.
Her leg was seriously injured by the attack, and she was taken to a local hospital, the Kenyan Star said. Marta Moiane, a director at the hospital, told the newspaper that the girl was the second admission to the hospital from a crocodile attack so far this year.
Crocodiles are common throughout Africa, with five species being native to the continent: the Nile crocodile, West African crocodile, West African slender-snouted crocodile, Central African slender-snouted crocodile, and the African dwarf crocodile.
The Nile crocodile is the largest and most aggressive of the five, and is responsible for hundreds of human deaths each year. They can grow to 14 feet long, but some rare specimens have been found to be over 20 feet long.
Nile crocodiles are often seen in the Limpopo River, which flows from South Africa, through Mozambique, to the Indian Ocean. Around 15,000 Nile crocodiles were accidentally released into the Limpopo from the nearby Rakwena Crocodile Farm in 2013 due to the flood gates being opened, with as many as 10,000 having remained uncaptured.
Nile crocodiles are often considered to be man-eaters. In South Africa and Eswatini between 1949 and 2016, 214 people were attacked by crocodiles, a study in 2020 found. Nile crocodiles killed at least 48 people in Africa in 2019 alone, estimates CrocBITE, a global crocodilian attack database. Around half of all attacks by Nile crocodiles are fatal, compared to 25 percent of saltwater crocodiles. Worldwide, all species of crocodiles are thought to kill around 1,000 people each year.
In the hamlet of Bawa, Mozambique, which barely has a population of 1,000 people, nearly 50 people have been killed by crocodiles in the last decade, NPR said.
Other recent attacks near the latest case have also resulted in the victim narrowly surviving. In April 2018, 25-year-old Zanele Ndlovu was pulled underwater from her canoe by a Nile crocodile on the Upper Zambezi River, and ended up losing her right arm. Also on the Zambezi, which flows through Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique, 18-year-old Amelie Osborn-Smith was attacked by a Nile crocodile, but was saved from being dragged underwater by her friends. She suffered serious injuries to her hip, lower leg, and right foot, but survived.
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