The story is still making the internet rounds, of a girl who fled from forced marriage and got a shielding from forest lions.
Lions are known carnivores and are likely to be aggressive to a human being. It was a different case altogether in this particular instance of the girl that had been missing for a week.
.”Everyone thinks this is some kind of miracle,” Sgt. Wondimu Wedajo told the Associated Press in June 2005, “because normally the lions would attack people.”
A gang of 7 men had taken her in southwestern Ethiopia because one of them wanted to force her to marry him
They’d beaten her again and again. The men were moving her through the countryside outside the town of Bita Genet when 3 lions came out and the men ran.Searchers and the girl’s family found her on June 9.
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By the sergeant’s account the lions had been with her for about half a day, and they hadn’t touched her. A local official, Tilahun Kassa, backed up the sergeant’s story. Stuart Williams, a wildlife expert with the government, had a possible explanation.
A crying child can sound a lot like a lion cub, he said. That may be why the lions didn’t eat her.Officers arrested 4 of the men.
The girl, the youngest of 4 children, was treated for her cuts. “They stood guard until we found her and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest,” the sergeant said.
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