An Indonesian husband reported his wife missing when she didn’t return to their home after she went to a plantation to collect rubber.
Police began a search for Jahra, 54, and her husband did his own search around the plantation and found his wife’s jacket, headscarf, sandals, and a knife.
Police, neighbors, and local people formed a search party and searched for the missing woman as well. They visited the plantation where Jahra’s husband had found her belongings, and this time, they encountered a massive snake, whose midsection was swollen, suggesting that it had swallowed something big.
They discovered that Jarha had been swallowed by the python.
The snake was still alive.
A villager took a video as the men tried to kill the giant snake and open it up. The footage shows one of the men pinning the head of the python on the ground using a tree branch and others bashing the snake above the swollen mid-region.
The video then shows the men carefully cutting the snake open and shockingly revealing the body of the missing woman, which the snake had swallowed.
The hard-to-watch video went viral on social media, showing the exact moment the gruesome discovery was made.
The head of the village told a news outlet that everyone was shocked to find that the woman they had been searching for was in the snake’s stomach. According to him, the snake most likely bit the woman, then wrapped itself around her, suffocating her before eventually swallowing her. He said that the snake probably would have taken two hours to finish the process.
Unfortunately, Sunday’s incident was not the first horrifying incident in Indonesia involving pythons.
The python that swallowed Jahra was not the biggest in the village, and villagers say they had previously spotted another 27-foot-long python, which they live in fear of.
Jahra’s unfortunate death comes a few years after another incident in which a woman in her 50s was swallowed by a giant snake, in 2018. A video was taken of that incident and posted on social media. It too, went viral.
In 2017, a 25-year-old palm oil farmer was swallowed by a 23-foot-long python. He was found a week after he disappeared from a village in Sulawesi. His body was retrieved intact, and just like with Jahra, it is assumed that the snake strangled him before swallowing him whole.
Experts believe deforestation may be the reason why snakes in the region seek new food sources. It is considered unusual for pythons to eat humans, and the pythons first ensure that the victim is dead before swallowing them.