Staff spotted a mauled shoe in the mouth of one of the four big cats living in the enclosure at Bahawalpur’s Sherbagh Zoo, in the province of Punjab, in Pakistan.

The remains were finally located on Wednesday morning and the zoo was forced to close.

‘When they cleaned the zoo and the dens, they found the (animal) holding a shoe in its mouth,’ Zaheer Anwar, a senior government official in Bahawalpur, told the media.

‘The staff got suspicious and then they found a body inside the den.’

The condition of the body suggests that the victim was mauled to death by tigers late Tuesday night.

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