‘Gando’ crocodiles turn on humans in Iran desert wastes

Tehran: Lying on the floor of his modest home, Siahouk was in excruciating pain from the injury to his right hand, the result of a nightmarish encounter. Just two days earlier, on a scorchingly hot August afternoon, the frail 70-yearold shepherd had gone to fetch water from a pond when he was pounced on by a gando, the local name for a mugger crocodile in Iran’s Baluchistan region.

“I didn’t see it coming,” he remembers of the traumatic event two years ago, with the shock and disbelief still vivid in his eyes.

Siahouk was only able to escape once he “managed to squeeze the plastic [water] bottle in between its jaws”, he says, reliving the moment as he rubs his bony face with his wrinkled left hand.

Scattered across Iran and the Indian subcontinent, gandos are broad-snouted crocodiles, classed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Iran has an estimated 400, comprising nearly 5% of the species. –(Agencies)