– ‘I think I saw a lynx’ –
Earlier Thursday, an AFP reporter saw around a dozen fire engines and police vehicles lined up near the supermarket where the tiger was first spotted.
“My wife saw it this morning,” Jean-Baptiste Berdeaux, who manages the Intermarche supermarket, told AFP.
“She didn’t get out of the car and called me to say ‘I think I saw a lynx’,” he said, adding she took a photo of the animal and the couple then alerted nearby police officers.
Some people playing tennis nearby also saw the animal sloping by.
Authorities said they were hoping to catch the tiger alive.
“If it’s possible, we’ll try and put it to sleep. If it becomes dangerous or aggressive, the order will be given to kill it,” police said.
A police source said the animal’s prints were found in the woodland.
It was as yet unclear where the animal came from.
Despite the town’s proximity to Disneyland Paris, a source close to the investigation said there was no link to the theme park.
Authorities have also made enquiries at a big-cat wildlife park 30 kilometres away.
Suspicion initially fell on a circus that had set up its tent in the supermarket car park a few days ago, but the mayor said it “did not have a tiger”.
A source close to the search operation said the hunt for any tiger would be made more difficult because if the big cat behaved in typical fashion, it would nap a lot, possibly spending hours unnoticed sleeping in a tree.
The PETA animal rights group called on authorities to “show restraint and compassion in dealing with this tiger on the loose”.
“This situation, however upsetting, is entirely preventable and should serve as a wake-up call to the public about the perils of keeping wild animals in captivity,” the group told AFP in a statement.
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