Bangkok, Thailand
CNN
—
A Thai woman was rescued by police after being strangled by a python for more than two hours.
The 64-year-old woman, who gave her name as Arom, was doing the dishes at home on the outskirts of the Thai capital when she felt several bites on her leg, she said in a police video obtained by CNN documenting the attack. “The snake just darted forward and bit me,” she said.
The python then wrapped itself around her until she fell to the ground. For two hours she tried unsuccessfully to free herself from the snake’s tightening coils, police said.
The woman screamed for help, but at first no one answered. Eventually one of her neighbors heard her desperate cries and called the police for help.
“We were shocked to see that the woman was tied to the ground and the python was wrapped around her,” Police Major Anusorn Wongmalee of the Phra Samut Chedi police station in Samut Prakan, a province south of Bangkok, told CNN on Thursday. “The snake was really big.”
Police video footage shows Arom sitting on the floor of a small room, trapped in the grip of the python that was wrapped around her waist.
According to police, it took rescue workers about 30 minutes to free her. She was then taken to hospital for further treatment.
The snake then escaped, police said. “We couldn’t catch it,” they added.
According to Thai National Parks, there are 250 species of snakes in Thailand, including three species of python – the reticulated python, the Burmese python and the blood python.
Pythons are not venomous, but kill by suffocation, coiling around their prey and squeezing it tightly to cut off the blood supply before swallowing their victims whole.
According to the Thai Health Department, around 12,000 people were treated for poisonous snake and animal bites last year. According to official figures, 26 people died from snake bites during this period.
The attack on Arom is the second such incident in the country to attract worldwide attention in recent weeks. Last month, a man was bitten in the testicles by a python while sitting on the toilet.
According to local media, he survived the encounter by hitting the snake with a cleaning brush and then calling a security guard to help him remove the snake.
