Oslo, August 6 (ANI): A polar bear killed an Eton schoolboy Horatio Chapple and brutally injured his four companions, who were on an Arctic expedition.
Chapple, 17, was killed when the 7ft, 40-stone bear attacked the tent in which he and his friends were sleeping on a glacier in Svalbard in Norway.happle's friends, Patrick Flinders, 16, and Scott Smith, 17, and the expedition guides, Michael Reid, 29, and Andrew Ruck, 27, were injured in the attack
The bear was finally shot dead by group members after Patrick reportedly punched the animal's nose.
Police arrived later at the scene only to find the bloody carcase of the bear among the dead and the injured in the tent.
Experts believe that polar bear may have been so hungry that it drove on into the encampment and ripped open the tents.
"The group had done the best they could and given first aid and stopped them getting hypothermia," the Telegraph quoted the physican and surgeon Erik Krag Jenssen, as saying.
He and his staff stabilised the four injured survivors and airlifted them to the hospital in Longyearbyen. They were subsequently admitted to University Hospital in Tromsoe, 600 miles away on mainland Norway.
Horatio's grandfather Sir John Chapple, 80, was the former President of the British Schools Exploring Society, which organised the trip.
Horatio's father and a spinal surgeon, David, and his mother Susan, were too upset to comment on their son's death.
The victims were part of a larger group that had landed in Spitsbergen, which is the largest island of the Norwegian Arctic Svalbard archipelago, at the start of a five-week adventure.
The island, which is located over 1,200 miles north of Oslo, is a home to over 3,000 polar bears. (ANI)
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