The body of an Indonesian boy who drowned was brought to the surface of the Mahakam River by a crocodile. The boy's body was then brought back to his family. In a video that was shared on social media, the deadly snake can be seen carrying the body of the 4-year-old boy to a boat of rescuers, who pulled him out of the water and brought him back to his family.
The boy, later named Muhammad Ziyad Wijaya, had been missing for two days near the Jawa Estuary on the east side of the island of Borneo in the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan. East Kalimantan Basarnas Search and Rescue Agency members had been trying to find the boy.
"The family told the team around 7 a.m. that they saw a crocodile carrying a human body," Melkianus Kotta, head of the East Kalimantan Basarnas Search and Relief Office, told a local news site. "The body turned out to be the child we had been looking for."
The toddler is thought to have drowned a mile from where the crocodile brought his body to the surface of the water. The crocodile went back into the water after letting the boy go near the rescue boat.
Kotta said, "Nothing is broken; everything is there."
He continued by saying that he thinks the crocodile helped the team find the missing child.
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists at least four different types of crocodiles that live in Indonesia. These include the Saltwater crocodile, which is the largest and fastest of all crocodile species, the New Guinea freshwater crocodile, the Siamese crocodile, and the Tomistoma.
The CrocBITE database of attacks shows that crocodiles kill about 1,000 people every year around the world. But this is just a guess, and many more attacks don't get reported. A 13-foot crocodile dragged a construction worker under water and ate him alive a few months ago in the Indonesian province of West Papua.
Still, crocodiles have been known to bring back dead people. In 2017, a 6.5-foot crocodile took a 41-year-old man named Syarifuddin from East Kalimantan, not far from where Muhammad went missing. The people in the area asked a "crocodile charmer" to help them get the man's body back. The BBC said that after the charmer did a ritual, the crocodile showed up on the bank of the river with a dead body in its mouth.
It is not clear if the crocodiles had anything to do with the death of little Muhammad.
A file photo shows a crocodile with its mouth open. A crocodile in Indonesia was an unlikely participant in a rescue mission.
ALEH VARANISHCHA/GETTY