Osama

Osama was a young male lion who, from 2002 to 2004, killed people in villages along the Rufiji River in southern Tanzania. Villagers named him after the terrorist Osama bin Laden, the most feared name of those years; the word is also Arabic for lion. He belonged to a pride that preyed on people, and at least 35 deaths, and by some counts more than 50 across eight villages, are attributed to him and the lions with him.

Unlike most man-eaters, Osama rarely attacked in the open. He broke through the mud walls of houses or crawled in through thatched roofs, seized a sleeper and dragged him out into the dark. Researchers believe he learned to hunt people from his mother, who had preyed on villagers before him. Rufiji is one of the places where the research of Craig Packer’s team found lion attacks on people to be most frequent in Tanzania, often in harvest season, when farmers sleep in fields to guard crops from bush pigs, which the lions hunt.

Game scouts shot Osama in April 2004, when he was only about three and a half. Afterwards a cracked molar with a large abscess was found in his jaw, which may have made hunting large prey painful; but other man-eaters have had perfectly healthy teeth, and his age, his mother’s example and the area’s scarce wild prey may matter more.