Police sharpshooters killed a polar bear that had come ashore on the northwestern tip of Iceland on Thursday.
Polar bear sightings in Iceland are rare, with the last recorded case in 2016. A resident in a remote holiday home on the coast in Hofdastrond in the Westfjords region had altered police to the animal’s presence.
“It’s not something we like to do,” Westfjords Police Chief Helgi Jensson told the Associated Press on Friday. “In this case, you can see in the picture, the bear was very close to a summer house. There was an old woman in there.”
Jensson said the owner, who was alone, locked herself upstairs while the bear rummaged through her garbage.
It’s considered possible that the bear traveled with the help of an iceberg to Iceland from Greenland, a journey of several hundred kilometers that is likely out of the range even of a land mammal capable of swimming for days at a time. Icelandic national broadcaster RUV said on Friday that a number of icebergs have…
