The photo is used for illustration purposes only and is not of the animal involved in Hamburg (Photo: Pixabay)
A wolf that bit a woman at a shopping center in Hamburg in northern Germany at the end of March – in the first such incident since the species returned to Germany some 30 years ago – is presumed dead, local authorities said on Saturday.
“Based on the available evidence, the animal is presumed dead,” the city’s environmental authority, Bukea, told AFP. This confirms several media reports about it.
The animal was released back into the wild a few days after being captured following the incident, but fitted with a tracking device.
According to Bukea, the wolf then left Hamburg and moved to a rural area more than 150 km away.
However, the signal from the tracking collar “suddenly stopped” late last month, Bukea added. The authority says it is unlikely that the tracking collar simply malfunctioned or fell off.
Experts “searched a wide area based on the geolocation” several times to no avail, the authority added.
Local public broadcaster NDR raised the possibility that the animal may have been shot.
In the incident at the end of March, the wolf bit a 65-year-old woman on the cheek and mouth and caused minor injuries. She wanted to try to help the animal after it ran into a shop window, the daily said Bild reported.
Experts suspected the wolf was a young animal that had become separated from its pack and was under severe stress.
The animal was spotted several times in different parts of Hamburg in the days before the attack.
After the incident, the wolf fled through the city before ending up in Hamburg’s Alstermeer and was subsequently caught.
Wolves had almost completely disappeared from Germany by the middle of the 19th century, mainly due to rewards offered for their capture and the destruction of their habitat.
However, some wolves from Poland began to settle in eastern Germany after German reunification in 1990, amid stronger measures to protect wildlife.
An official study last year identified 219 wolf packs right across Germany.
The government passed a bill in December authorizing regular hunting of wolves to manage populations in densely populated areas.
This step followed after the European Union recently reclassified the wolf from a “strictly protected species” to a “protected species”.