Image credit : Illustrative image

The tigress Avni or T1, who allegedly killed 13 people in the Pandharkawada- Ralegaon forests of Yavatmal district in eastern Maharashtra over the last year and a half, was shot dead last night.

The Forest Department said that it will be sharing the details of the operation at a press conference in Nagpur on Saturday.

Tigree Avni’s postmortem will be conducted at Nagpur’s Gorewada Rescue Centre.

The six-year-old mother of two cubs, who was labelled as a man-eater, had been the focus of a massive hunt for the past few months.

The Forest Department issued a shoot-to-kill order for her this year. The shoot-to-kill order was reportedly only to be used as a last resort. It was challenged in courts all the way to the Supreme Court.

The Bombay High Court’s Nagpur Bench last month admitted a PIL that sought a stay on plans to kill Avni and instead capture her alive.

A change.org petition to ‘save tigress Avni’ that was signed by over 50,000 people said that her killing “would eventually result in the death of her two cubs too, as they are both too young to hunt and survive on their own”.

The Forest Department had deployed a team of over 100 people to make sure that the tigress and her cubs would not wander close to the nearby villages again.

Also employed on the hunt for Avni were around a 100 camera traps, a pack of hunter dogs and drones and a motorised paraglider that was being used to survey the forest from a height of about a 1000 feet.

The hunt for the elusive tigress was even making international headlines.

Despite the all-out nature of the hunt that has been launched, tigress Avni remained untraceable for a long time. That, perhaps, was the only silver lining for a bunch of activists who have voiced fierce opposition to the hunt.

The activists have begun petitioning officials as high as the President of India, requesting him to step in and get the shoot-to-kill order withdrawn.