Authorities said on Thursday that they had located the remains of a 12-year-old Australian girl who had gone missing and was thought to have been attacked by a crocodile.
The girl’s T-shirt was found upstream on Wednesday at roughly 6:15 p.m. local time, according to a police official, and her body was located in a Northern Territory river on Thursday morning.
At Palumpa, NT Police Senior Sgt. Erica Gibson said Australian Broadcasting Corporation, “It was particularly gruesome and a sad and devastating outcome.”
The unidentified young girl was last seen on Tuesday local time in Australia’s Northern Territory, which is thought to be home to 100,000 saltwater crocodiles, the most of any place on Earth, despite the fact that assaults are uncommon there.
She was on a bush holiday close to the isolated Aboriginal village of Nganmarriyanga, about seven hours’ drive southwest of Darwin in one of Australia’s most northern regions, when she went swimming at Mango Creek in Palumpa with family members.
Gibson acknowledged that the young girl’s wounds were consistent with being attacked by a crocodile. “It was an extremely difficult 36 hours for the first responders involved in the search, she said, adding that the bereaved family is “in a state of extreme shock and disbelief.”
Related: Desperate Search for Missing 12-Year-Old After Crocodile Attack
Australian police received a report about the girl’s disappearance on Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. local time.
Witnesses reported seeing a black crocodile in the neighborhood. However, it was not stated if the alleged reptile had been found or identified in any other way.
Ten police officers were allegedly assisted by some forty members of the public with a foot, boat, and aerial search along the “narrow, but long and winding” riverbanks of Mango Creek.
According to sources, this is the first fatal attack that has occurred in the NT since 2018.
Although there have been several documented fatal crocodile attacks in Queensland in recent years, the Northern Territory has seen at least two recorded crocodile attacks in the past year.
An expert on Australian crocodiles recommended that the territorial government support indigenous organizations in isolated settlements, such as the one where the girl was purportedly abducted by the crocodile in issue.
The chief minister of the territory has stated that there is “always more to be done around croc safety” and that the Northern Territory has allocated $500,000 for crocodile control initiatives in its most recent budget.
“We can’t have the crocodile population outnumber the human population in the Northern Territory,” Chief Minister Eva Lawler stated. “We do need to keep our crocodile numbers under control.”
