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Animal trappers in Indonesia have captured a monkey that spent two weeks attacking people at random on the island of Sumatra, wounding 18 residents and forcing dozens of schools to shut down.
The adult long-tailed macaque targeted victims who were alone, biting and clawing at residents in the town of Tembilahan. The injured included both children and elderly individuals.
"As of today, there were 19 attacks with 18 victims. One victim was attacked twice," Junaidy Ismail, head of the Tembilahan fire and rescue service, stated on Friday. Some of those injured required more than a dozen stitches alongside rabies vaccines.
Trappers caught the monkey on Thursday using a town trap. The rescue service released a video on Friday showing the animal alive, though visibly stressed, inside a cage.
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Town official Ari Syuria urged residents to remain cautious, saying the monkey could have operated as part of a gang. "The concern is that there may be other monkeys attacking people," Ari said in an Instagram post.
Forty schools remained closed on Friday, with three days of online learning ordered for hundreds of Tembilahan pupils. Doors will reopen next Monday if it is deemed safe, the local government said in a statement.
The captured monkey has been transferred to Pekanbaru, the capital of Sumatra's Riau province, where the nature conservation agency will carry out blood and observational tests. "We want to establish whether the monkey is carrying any diseases," agency official Ujang Holisudin noted.
Human-animal conflicts are common in the vast Southeast Asian archipelago, especially in areas where the clearing of rainforest to make way for palm oil plantations is shrinking the habitats of animals such as monkeys, elephants and tigers.
Puji Rianti, a biology lecturer at IPB University south of Jakarta, said some monkeys have also learnt to associate humans with food. "It's not easy to look for food in the forest. It is easier to get food by living near humans by stealing," she said.
It was also possible that the rampaging monkey was a former pet released into the wild, Puji said.
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