A herd of wild elephants gathers near a field in search of food at a village in Nagaon district, Assam, India, on December 24, 2025. Anuwar Hazarika/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Indian wildlife officers are hunting a rampaging wild elephant blamed for killing at least 20 people and injuring 15 others in the forests of Jharkhand, villagers and officials said Tuesday.

The elephant, a lone bull, is reported to have gone on the rampage for nine days beginning in early January, creating panic in the rural West Singhbhum district.

"We are trying to trace and rescue this violent wild elephant that killed so many people," government forest officer Aditya Narayan told AFP, confirming the toll of 20 dead.

Children and the elderly are among the dead, as well as a professional elephant handler, known as a mahout.

But after wreaking a trail of destruction, it had not been spotted since Friday, despite multiple patrols in the area.

Officials said search teams, aided by drones, are combing dense forest tracts, including a national reserve in neighboring Odisha state.

Fear has driven residents of more than 20 villages to abandon their farms or barricade themselves indoors at night, elected village head Pratap Chachar told AFP.

"A police team, or forest official vehicle, visits in the night to provide essential help to villagers," Chachar said.

Hundreds of thousands of Indians are affected each year by crop-raiding elephants.

Asian elephants are now restricted to just 15% of their original habitat.

The usually shy animals are coming into increasing contact with humans because of rapidly expanding settlements and growing forest disturbance, including mining operations.

As elephant habitats shrink, conflict between humans and wild elephants has grown - 629 people were killed by elephants across India in 2023-2024, according to parliamentary figures.

The elephants that pose the most danger to humans are often rogue bulls, solitary male animals enraged during "musth," a period of heightened sexual activity when testosterone levels soar.

A former forest official said the elephant was likely in musth, and may now have calmed down and rejoined its herd.

India is home to the majority of the world`s remaining wild Asian elephants, a species listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and increasingly threatened by shrinking habitat.

The Wildlife Institute of India last year issued a new estimate that put the country`s wild elephant population at 22,446, a report that also warned of the deepening pressures on one of India`s most iconic animals.

Last month, seven elephants were killed and a calf was injured when a high-speed passenger train collided with a herd crossing the tracks in India`s northeastern state of Assam.

The country recently opened an elephant hospital in Mathura. The southern state of Tamil Nadu has also launched an artificial intelligence and machine learning-enabled surveillance system meant to help prevent elephant deaths on railways.

There have been deadly elephant attacks in other parts of the world in recent months.

Last July, two women from the U.K. and New Zealand were killed by an elephant while on a walking safari in Zambia.

In April 2025, officials in Kenya said a 54-year-old man was killed by an elephant in the central part of the country.

In January last year, a tourist was killed by an elephant in South Africa`s famous Kruger Park.

That same month, police in Thailand said a "panic-stricken" elephant killed a Spanish tourist while she was bathing the animal at a sanctuary. The month before that, an elephant killed a 49-year-old woman at a national park in Loei province in northern Thailand.

In July 2024, a Spanish tourist was trampled to death by elephants after he left his fiancée in the car to take photos at a different game reserve in South Africa.