Ethiopian pastor became a victim of the tragedy while he was baptising the followers on a lake Abaya, BBC reported on Tuesday. The traditional Sunday service ended with the Docho Eshete’s death after a crocodile attacked and killed the vicar.
Ethiopian police arrived at the place of tragedy in the minutes but the officers only managed to get clergyman’s dead body. According to Eiwnetu Kanko, a police officer from Arba Minch, 300 miles south of Addis Ababa, an 80-strong congregation looked on in horror as the reptile struck at Docho Eshete. Nobody could imagine just a second ago that Protestant mass baptism ceremony ends so tragically despite Abaya is Ethiopia’s second largest lake and it is known for having a Nile crocodile population.
Lake Abaya was the place where pastor Eshete used to baptise. On Sunday, he did the same to the first person and he passed on to another one, but suddenly a crocodile jumped out of the lake and grabbed the pastor, ‘pushing aside the person he was baptising, said the local resident at the service, Ketema Kairo.
According to the witnesses of the tragedy, members of the congregation, fishermen on the lake attempted to rescue the pastor but that was almost impossible, the reptile jaws are a lethal weapon. An alligator is an opportunistic, ambush predator hat clamps their jaws firmly down on their prey immediately after catching it and then perform a “death roll” that disorients victims and breaks their bones.
Fishermen threw out their nets to block the crocodile from taking Mr Docho into deeper water, but by the time they extricated him, he was already dead. “They were unable to save him,” said the police officer.
