A 54-year-old woman in Indonesia was swallowed by a giant, 22-foot python. A shocking video went viral on social media, showing the exact moment the gruesome discovery was made. It is very hard to watch.
Local police began searching for the victim, who was identified as Jahra, 54, after her husband reported her missing when she didn’t return home from a trip to a plantation in Jambi province, where she had gone to collect rubber.
According to the Betara Police Chief, Jahra’s husband searched the area around the plantation and found his wife’s jacket, headscarf, sandals, and a knife.
Authorities, neighbors, and other local people formed a search party and searched for the missing woman the next day. They returned to the location where Jahra’s husband had found her belongings, and this time, they encountered the massive snake, whose midsection was swollen, suggesting that it had swallowed something big.
The snake was still alive.
A villager took the video footage as the men tried to kill the giant snake and open it up. It shows one of the men pinning the head of the python on the ground using a tree branch and others bashing the snake above the swollen mid-region.
The disturbing video then shows men carefully cutting the snake open and shockingly revealing the body of the missing woman, which the snake had swallowed.
Anto, the head of the village, told a news outlet that everyone was shocked to find that the woman they had been searching for was in the snake’s stomach. According to the him, the snake most likely bit the woman, then wrapped itself around her body to suffocate her before eventually swallowing her. He said that the snake typically would have taken two hours to finish the process.
Unfortunately, Sunday’s incident was just one of many similar horrifying incidents in Indonesia involving pythons. Experts blame increased deforestation for the rising cases of people getting eaten by snakes in Indonesia.
The python that swallowed Jahra was not the biggest in the village, and villagers say they had previously spotted another 27-foot-long python. Authorities said that the 27-foot-long one was not captured, and the locals live in fear that bigger snakes are still in the heavily forested area.
Jahra’s unfortunate death comes a few years after another woman in her 50’s was swallowed by a giant snake in 2018. That incident happened in the Muna District located in Sulawesi. Locals also recorded a video of the incident and posted it on social media, where it went viral.
In 2017, a 25-year old palm oil farmer was swallowed by a 23-foot-long python. He was found a week after he disappeared from a village in Sulawesi. His body was retrieved intact, and just like with Jahra, it is assumed that the snake strangled him before swallowing him whole.
Experts believe deforestation accounts for why snakes in the region are forced to seek new food sources. It is considered unusual for pythons to eat humans, and the pythons first ensure that the victim is dead before swallowing them.
