SEARCH teams looking for a crocodile attack victim in Sarawak, have recovered his headless and limbless torso after three days of scouring Sg Dit in the Betong administrative division.

Abang Mohamad Haikal Abang Suip, who only got to taste two days of secondary school life, was snatched by the reptile on Wednesday evening while he was sitting on the bank of Sg Dit, which flows past his Kampung Melayu Dit home in the rural town of Debak, about 204km from Kuching.

He was there fishing with his uncle, Sine Bujang.

Sine reported the crocodile lunged out of the water to grab the 13 year-old and dragged him to the river.

A combined Fire and Rescue Department and Kpg Dit village search team found the torso at a river bend at 10.45am, some 1.5km from Kampung Buda – another Malay village on the same river. 

Police and Civil Defence Force personnel were also in the search.

The torso was brought to the Debak health clinic for identification before it was released to his family for burial.

Sg Dit is a tributary of the crocodile-infested Batang Lupar, home to Bujang Senang, the giant “white backed” man-eater that terrorised the river from the 1940s to the early 90s.

Of the of 42 reports of crocodile attacks in Malaysia from 2007 to 2013, 40 of them are from Sarawak. 

In the last two years, 32 crocodile attacks were reported in the state, with 11 of them fatal, according to the Sarawak Forestry Corporation (SFC) statistics.

In comparison, there were only three reported attacks between 1940 and 1949.

It was only in the 1980s that the number of crocodile attacks on humans spiked as the population of the pre-historic reptile in 10 of the state’s 55 navigable rivers reportedly increased dramatically to “at least 13,500”, according to the SFC statistics.

The boom in numbers was due in part to the protection the crocodiles have enjoyed as a totally protected species under the state’s Wildlife Protection Act.

Until October 2016, Sarawak crocodiles were also listed in Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, which prohibits the sale and slaughter of the reptile.

Being in Appendix I also means the species is threatened with extinction, and are, or may be, affected by trade and, therefore, there is a ban on commercial trade on crocodiles, and it is illegal to catch “wild specimens”. 

The protection level has however been downgraded to Appendix II, which means the specie is not necessarily threatened with extinction and could be commercially traded but may subject to strict regulation.

This would allow culling to manage the population of crocodiles in the wild, and their skin and meat may be traded. – January 5, 2018.