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Kenya Wildlife Service captures stray hyena in Embakasi

A hyena at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Laikipia County. PHOTO |FILE

The Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) on Tuesday, May 28, captured a hyena that was roaming in Embakasi and returned it to its natural habitat at Nairobi National Park.

KWS said in a statement that they received an urgent call and deployed a specialised predator trap, ensuring the hyena’s capture without harm.

“The KWS Nairobi team received an urgent call from the National Police Service ‘A’ campus in Embakasi. An unexpected visitor had been spotted roaming the grounds: A hyena!. Our team sprang into action, deploying a specially designed predator trap to safely capture the hyena without causing it any harm. After careful planning and execution, the hyena was successfully captured and ready to be returned to its rightful home,” KWS said in a statement.

The capture and relocation come just days after KWS dispatched a special team to hunt down a lioness spotted in a residential area of Ongata Rongai in Kajiado County.

The lioness was captured on CCTV scaling a boundary wall and snatching a pedigree dog from a private residence in Nazarene residential area last week.

In a statement, KWS spokesman Paul Jinaro said the Human-Wildlife Conflict (HWC) team was pursuing the lioness after the CCTV footage went viral on social media.

In February, KWS discovered human remains near the site where a student at Multimedia University in Kajiado was attacked by a hyena.

Following protests by students at the university, KWS admitted in a statement that it had found the remains of another person who it believed had been attacked by the said hyenas.

The two people were attacked by the hyena in Rongai and “critically injured by hyenas in the Ole Kasasi area of Rongai, Kajiado County,” KWS said.

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