People living close to a chimpanzee research centre in Guinea had attacked the facility on Friday after a woman claimed that one of the animals had killed her infant.
The centre’s managers had said that furious crowd had plundered the building, damaging and setting fire to equipment including drones, computers and over 200 vital documents.
However, eyewitnesses said that the crowd was reacting to the news that the mutilated body of an infant had been found 3 km (1.9 miles) from the Nimba Mountains Nature Reserve — a place listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The deceased child’s mother, Seny Zogba, had told Reuters she was working in a cassava field when a chimpanzee came up from behind, bit her and pulled her baby into the forest.
A local ecologist, Alidjiou Sylla said the shortening supply of food in the reserve was forcing the animals to leave the protected area more frequently, thereby increasing the possibility of attacks.
Since the start of the year, the research centre said it had recorded six chimpanzee attacks on humans within the reserve.
The forests of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are habitats to the largest population of the critically endangered western chimpanzee, estimated to have reduced by 80% between 1990 and 2014, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Chimpanzees are respected in Guinea and are traditionally given gifts in the form of food, forcing some to venture out of the protected area and into human settlements, where they can sometimes attack.
