Alligator That Killed Jogger is Captured

A four-day hunt for an alligator that killed a jogger in Florida reached a grisly climax when trappers captured the reptile with the victim's arms still in its stomach.

Wildlife officials also found a dead raccoon, a rubbish sack and a turtle shell inside the nearly 3-metre (9ft 6in) alligator, which weighed 180kg (400lbs) and took five men 30 minutes to haul from the canal where Yovy Suarez Jiménez, 28, a student, disappeared.

"Thank God, it was the one," said trapper Kevin Garvey, whose team used a pig's lung for bait and captured two other alligators before snaring the killer. He said that the alligator was blind in one eye, which would have hampered its search for food and made it more aggressive.

Ms Jiménez, an aspiring model, was the 18th person to die in Florida from an alligator attack since 1948, officials said, but the first in Broward County, which was built almost entirely on land reclaimed from the Everglades, the reptiles' natural habitat. Low water levels following a long dry spell have forced larger numbers of alligators into residential areas in recent weeks. On the same day that Ms Jiménez vanished, a 74-year-old woman in Punta Gorda used a hosepipe nozzle to fight one off after it attacked her while she was watering her plants.

Joshua Perper, the Broward County medical examiner, said that Ms Jiménez died of massive bite wounds and would have been dead by the time she was pulled into the water.