A mining manager on a remote Arctic island has been caught on camera running for his life from a polar bear.
The Russian man can be seen fleeing as he is chased by the bear which has invaded a settlement on Svalbard. Gunfire can be heard as he attempted to scare the animal away, but it keeps chasing the man, who eventually had to leap a fence.
The man drops his rifle as he leaps onto a snowmobile and speeds away. The bear was only a few feet away as he raced off. The lumbering bear gives chase to the snowmobile, but the site manager escapes and was reportedly unharmed.
The drama was watched by tourists, believed to be American. One was heard saying: “Very brave guy……Damn, that guy is brave.”
A spokeswoman for Arktikugol, a Russian Arctic coal company which operates in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, said: “Both the man and the bear are currently fine. No-one was injured. The man is the head of the production site in the settlement of Pyramiden.
“Employees of the trust undergo training and monitor the safety of tourists, among other duties. At the time, there were about 80 people in the settlement, who were staying at the Tulip Hotel.”
The company source said: “Bears frequently enter Pyramiden because their migration route runs through the area. Some bears are aggressive, while others are more timid and skittish.”
There are around 300 polar bears on Svalbard. The same bear had been seen two days earlier “inspecting snowmobiles”. Eyewitnesses said food had been left in the snowmobiles, which attracted the predator.
The Mirror earlier reported that a 29-year-old man suffered horrific injuries after he climbed over a chain-link fence to get a selfie with a 15ft crocodile at a zoo in the south of the Philippines.
He was bizarrely said to have mistaken the crocodile for a stature at the zoo on April 28. Horrified witnesses screamed at the man to leave as the female croc, named Lalay, surged towards him and sank her fangs deep into his arm.
Gruesome footage shows the tourist in agony as the reptile refused to let him leave the enclosure in Zamboanga Sibugay, south of the Philippines. The croc then latched onto his thigh and flipped over several times, trying to tear him apart in a brutal “death roll.”
The tourist was reportedly trapped in the pen in agony for up to 30 minutes before Lalay’s caretaker risked his own life by climbing inside and rescuing him. The reptile handler was said to have slammed a piece of cement onto Lalay’s head, prompting her to loosen her grip.
Zoo staff wrapped the visitor’s wounded arm and thigh with cloth to stanch the bleeding before rushing him to a hospital for treatment. He received more than 50 stitches.
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