It’s the stuff of nightmares and bad clickbait. But this is as real as it gets. This week, a missing 25-year-old farmer from the island of Sulawesi in the Indonesian archipelago was found swallowed whole by villagers on the island. As you can see in the gruesome video, they cut the huge belly of the python open to find their friend inside.
Akbar Salubiro went missing Monday after we had gone to harvest palm oil. “They didn’t find him (Akbar), but the villagers saw an unmoving python in the ditch,” a local villager told BBC Indonesia. “They grew suspicious that maybe the snake had Akbar. When they cut it open, Akbar was inside the snake.”
The Associated Press reported that one of the man’s boots and tools had been found near the snake. Pythons, in this case a reticulated python, eat large mammals by squeezing them to death and then swallowing them. Attacks on humans are rare. In fact, according to the BBC, finding documented cases of pythons killing humans is nearly impossible. There have been rumors, such as in the Philippines, where one tribe claimed that a quarter of its men have suffered from attacks by the snake in the jungle. But this is the first case documented in the mobile phone era.
