File picture: Roslan Rahman/AFP
An Indonesian family have been reunited with their dead son after his body was carried to the surface of the Mahakam River by a crocodile.
A viral video shared around the world on social media shows the deadly reptile carrying the body of the 4-year-old boy to a boat of rescuers, who retrieved him from the water and brought him back to his family.
The 4-year-old, later identified as Muhammad Ziyad Wijaya, went missing two days earlier, near the Jawa Estuary on the east of the island of Borneo in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan.
According to local media, members of the East Kalimantan Basarnas Search and Rescue Agency had been searching for the boy.
“Around seven in the morning, the team received information from the family that they saw a crocodile carrying a human body,” head of the East Kalimantan Basarnas Search and Relief Office Melkianus Kotta told detik.com, a local news outlet.
“It turned out that the body was the child we were looking for.”
The crocodile carried the toddler’s body in his mouth to the surface of the water, 1.6km away from where he is thought to have drowned. After releasing the boy beside the rescue boat, the crocodile retreated back into the water.
Following a preliminary examination, it became clear that there were no bite marks on the boy’s body.
“Nothing is missing; everything is intact,” Kotta said.
He went on to say that he thinks the crocodile actually helped the team in their search for the missing child.
Indonesia is home to at least four different crocodilian species, as detailed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature: the Saltwater crocodile, the largest and fastest of all the crocodile species; the New Guinea freshwater crocodile; the Siamese crocodile; and the Tomistoma.
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