An agreement has been reached between the Autonomous Province of Trento and Angelo Metlicovec, the pensioner attacked by the bear Kj2 on 22 July 2017. The Province will compensate the man, who had suffered numerous injuries in the attack and a disability of 15% to the arm. The attack had taken place along path 627 in Predera, near the Terlago lake area, where Metlicovec, 69 years old at the time, was taking a walk with his dog. After being attacked, the man fled by jumping into a gully to escape the bear. Once the animal had gone away, the pensioner had alerted the rescuers with his phone.
On the spot there was an inspection by the foresters of the Province of Trento who collected samples useful for identifying the animal responsible for the attack. Suspicions immediately fell on Kj2, a 15-year-old she-bear, daughter of Kirza and Jose, bears imported twenty years earlier from Slovenia as part of the Life Ursus project. Two years earlier the bear Kj2 had been responsible for another attack, against Wladimir Molinari, which took place in June 2015 in the same area while the man was jogging. Metlicovec turned to the Court of Trento asking for compensation of 68,000 euros. However, the judge of first instance rejected the request, deeming the attack a “fortuitous event”, since the Province – reads the sentence – “had adopted all suitable measures, if not to prevent, at least to avoid the possibility of bear attack”.
The man then filed an appeal but an economic agreement was reached during the hearings. Bear Kj2, on the other hand, was captured and fitted with a radio collar in October 2015, after the attack on Molinari, but was immediately released pending the DNA test on some fur samples to prove that she was responsible . In the spring of 2016, the bear lost her tracking device and disappeared from the tracking system. The then president of the Province, Ugo Rossi, signed an order to cull the animal, which was killed by foresters on 12 August 2017, causing controversy and boycott campaigns in Trentino by the animal rights world. For that ordinance, after two requests for dismissal by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the investigating judge requested the compulsory indictment of Rossi and the manager of the Forestry and Wildlife Service Maurizio Zanin, because – according to the judge – they should have evaluated another path, different from felling. Both were then acquitted in May of this year because the “necessity of killing” was recognised, given the danger of the bear.
