DECCAN CHRONICLE (Bangalore, India) 26 October 10 Mosquito bite kills snake man

Hyderabad: In a bizarre twist of fate, the ‘snake man,’ K. Raj Kumar, who escaped the bite of venomous reptiles 29 times, has fallen prey to a mosquito bite.

Ophiologist Raj Kumar passed away from complications caused by cerebral malaria at a city hospital on Monday morning.

Raj Kumar had been to Visakhapatnam recently, but his family said that he could have been bitten by the killer mosquito in the city.

Raj Kumar, whose adventures with snakes were featured in the television show of Paul Merton, was a celebrity of sorts and was running the Friends of Snakes Society in the Defence Colony in the city. He was a regular on the school circuit.

As a child, he wondered why people killed snakes and his mother, Ms K. Joan, told him that they were beautiful creations of God who were misunderstood. This left a deep impression in his mind and he used to say always that snakes were soft, warm and friendly.

“He knew the art of capturing snakes and handled them gently as we handle newborns,” said the deputy conservator of forests, Mr A. Shankaran, a long-time friend of Raj Kumar.

“As a school boy he used to rescue snakes and hand over them to the zoo,” Mr Shankaran added.
Mosquito bite kills snake man

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