KARACHI: The wildlife department is yet to recover the carcass of a juvenile Indus dolphin, a highly endangered river mammal, which was brutally killed by villagers early on Friday morning after getting it trapped in a shallow river channel near Daharki, sources told Dawn.

The sources said that children swimming in the shallow waters of Narli minor, a channel fed by Ghotki canal in Gono Khan village, got scared when they spotted a ‘black animal’ moving fast from one direction to another.

“Some of them ran out and informed their elders who rushed to ‘save’ their children. They hit the dolphin multiple times with axes and sticks, which resulted in its immediate death,” Shams Bhutto, a Daharki-based journalist who visited the spot soon after the incident, quoted the villagers as saying.

The villagers mistook the dolphin as something which could harm their children, he added.

“They couldn’t identify it even after killing the poor animal and some youth reportedly tied the animal with a rope and took it around the village while others took its pictures and shared them on the social media,” he said.

According to him, the dolphin carcass is apparently ‘missing’ as some people claim that it has been buried in the village while others say that it has been thrown into the same water body from where the animal was found.

As the mainstream media picked up the news and criticism poured in over villagers’ apathy towards the animal later in the day, teams from the wildlife department and the World Wide Fund for Nature, a non-governmental organisation working for dolphin conservation, reached the spot in the afternoon for an inquiry.

Fearing action from the government, local residents, however, twisted their account when they spoke to the officials.

“We are told that the dolphin was found dead floating in the channel by a villager who took its pictures and uploaded them on his facebook page. Later, the carcass was thrown back in the channel,” said deputy conservator wildlife Taj Mohammad Sheikh.

The department staff, he said, had mounted a search for the carcass but couldn’t locate it so far.

“We will continue our search tomorrow (Saturday),” he said.

WWF representative Imran Malik, who accompanied the wildlife team, said that it seemed that the dolphin calf got entangled in fishing net and later got killed.

“Its rostrum is broken. It is quite possible that it died of injuries and later found dead floating in the channel,” he said, adding that carcass recovery was vital to know the real cause of death.

Published in Dawn, June 18th, 2016