A circus lion escaped and was seen roaming around heavily populated streets for hours in a suburb of Rome on Saturday, before it was sedated and captured by authorities.
Alessandro Grando, mayor of the seaside town of Ladispoli, on the western fringe of the Italian capital, confirmed in a Facebook post just before 10:30 p.m. (4:30 p.m. ET) that the lion had been caught, hours after the alarm had been raised.
The operation to bring the animal back into captivity involved Italy’s state police, local police, the Carabinieri military police force and local volunteers. Grando said it had been “hours of great learning.”
Footage shot from a police helicopter using an infrared camera showed the lion, named Kimba, strolling around a grassy area. Mobile phone footage posted to social media, which has not been verified by NBC News, shows the animal quickly but calmly walking down a residential street, ignoring the cars and houses on either side.
Rony Vassallo, animal handler at the the Rony Roller Circus, told the AFP news agency that eight-year-old Kimba was not a threat to the public.
“He met with people in an environment he wasn’t used to… and nothing happened, he didn’t even for a second have the instinct to attack a person,” he told the news agency.
Grando added that he hoped the incident helps bring an end to the practise of circuses keeping animals in captivity.
“I hope this episode can raise some conscience, and that we can finally put an end to animal exploitation in circuses,” he said.
While still legal in Italy, it has been banned in more than 20 European countries. Lawmakers in the lower house of Italy’s parliament have passed a law that would ban live animals in circuses, but it has not yet been implemented.
This story comes four months after a rather more chaotic hunt for an escaped lion in Germany. After hundreds of police officers spent hours of searching using thermal imaging cameras and helicopters, police finally admitted that there was in fact no lion and grainy mobile phone footage that triggered the panic likely showed a wild boar.