Boy strangled by jacket cord in zoo tragedy

A 10-year-old Russian boy was killed when a cord on his jacket got caught on a tiger's cage in a zoo and he was strangled.

A 10-year-old Russian boy was killed when a cord on his jacket got caught on a tiger's cage in a zoo and he was strangled.

Svetlana Glushchenko, the spokeswoman for the Penza zoo in central Russia, said that zoo workers had found the dead boy yesterday afternoon when they went to feed the animals. She said that the zoo had very few visitors on weekdays during the winter, and that there were no witnesses to the boy's killing.

But she said that investigators had tentatively concluded that the boy, whom she did not identify, had been teasing the tiger by throwing wooden sticks at it, and had climbed onto the cage and managed to remove one of its locks.

The investigators theorize that the tiger had lunged in the boy's direction and that he had tried to run away, but a cord on his jacket snagged on the cage and he could not free himself, Glushchenko said.