Thursday November 18, 1999

Four tigers attacked Xu Weixing, 42, when he got off his bus inside a tiger pen that covers several acres at the Shanghai Safari Park, newspapers and the state-run Xinhua news agency said.

It took animal keepers 30 minutes to retrieve Xu, who died at a hospital within an hour of the attack, Xinhua said.

The safari park is home to some of the last Siberian tigers and is trying to breed them. Only a few hundred live in the wild in northeastern China and the Russian Far East.

Xu drove into the tiger pen after a bus carrying the students broke down, according to the Xinmin Evening News and the Shanghai News. He attached his own bus to the crippled vehicle and pulled it toward the exit before climbing down to ask a third bus to clear the road.

Animals at the four-year-old park have attacked people before, but this is the first fatality, Xinhua said. The park has more than 10,000 animals from some 200 species. It has received 4 million visitors, according to Xinhua.

There was no information on what would happen to the tigers who attacked, and park officials were not available for comment Thursday.

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