22-foot Python Swallows Woman Whole, Locals Cut Open Giant Snake To Retrieve Body

A 54-year-old woman in Indonesia who went missing Sunday died after she was swallowed whole by a giant python. The locals who were searching for the missing woman retrieved her remains by cutting open the 22-foot snake, reports said.

The shocking incident happened in a village in West Tanjab Regency in the Jambi province of Indonesia. The victim, identified only by her first name Jahrah went missing after she went for collecting rubber from a plantation near her family home, NY Post reported citing local news outlet CNN Indonesia.

After Jarrah did not return home by evening, her husband went looking for her but to no avail. However, he did find her sandals, jacket, headscarf, and knife. The man returned to the location with a search team the following day, and they then found the enormous snake with a swollen mid-section, indicating it had eaten something big, Police Chief AKP Herafa told the local news outlet.

A distressing video shared by the outlet showed a volunteer from the search party carefully pinning down the snake's head with a branch while others thrashing it above its swollen region of the belly. The villagers then cut open the snake and found the body of the missing woman, reports said.

"Everyone was astonished. It turned out that the woman we were looking for was in the snake's stomach," Anto Hasibuan, the head of the village told ViralPress.

The python must have bitten the woman before wrapping itself around her and suffocating her, Hasibuan said, adding that the giant snake could have swallowed her in almost two hours.

The villagers have previously spotted a 27-foot python from the same locality, but the animal could not be captured. Meanwhile, the incident has instilled fear in the locals who are "worried that bigger snakes are still in the forest."

In a similar incident last year, an 11-foot-long python in India swallowed a monkey alive and regurgitated it after it was caught. The incident happened in the western state of Gujarat when forest officials came to rescue the snake, which was spotted lying near the bank of a small river.