BHUBANESWAR: The Forest department on Monday managed to tow the adult tusker’s carcass to Mahanadi river bank. Though the carcass was recovered after it washed ashore a sandbar at Satabati near Jagatpur area of Cuttack on Sunday, forest officials managed to bring it to the river bank after several hours of struggle on the day. As it was already evening, the postmortem will be done on Tuesday and the report will be submitted to the Wildlife headquarters, an official said.
However, it is yet to officially confirm if it is the same tusker which was stranded in the river at Mundali barrage for nearly 20 hours last week. The identification could not be done due to delay in postmortem, said an official of City Forest Division.
Forest officials, however, said that they believe it to be the same tusker that remained trapped as there was no report of any other elephant getting swept away in the flooded river between Friday and Sunday. Meanwhile, OTV cameraman Prabhat Sinha who was admitted to the ICU after capsizing of the boat during the elephant rescue operation was discharged from the SCB Medical College and Hospital on the day. OTV senior journalist Arindam Das and ODRAF’s scuba diver Sitaram Murmu had died in the operation.