One man is dead and another had a part of his scalp swiped off by a leopard that wandered into an eastern India city on Saturday.

The men were among five people attacked by the wild leopard that went on a three-hour rampage in the city of Guwahati before authorities were able to tranquilize it, according to MSNBC (warning the photos here are pretty graphic).

Residents of the area told The Associated Press that the leopard attacked a 50-year-old lawyer while he was talking on his cellphone outside his house that day. The man was taken to a hospital where he succumbed to his injury on Sunday, The AP reported.

The Telegraph in Calcutta, India, reported that the animal was taken to the Assam State Zoo-cum-Botanical Garden. That report also noted that the thousands had gathered in the street at Silpukhuri, trying to see the animal, which cornered and threatened and hounded by the crowd, was willing to attack anyone in its path.

Every time it turned, the crowd would fall back and then go forward again, The Calcutta paper reported. Except for the maddening crowd, nothing moved - no vehicles, no TV crew, no police, no zoo officials.

The paper also reported that the unruly crowd made the task of tranquillising the animal all the more difficult, noting that it took some 45 minutes to tranquilize the leopard.

Two additional shots had to been fired while normally it takes a single shot, the paper reported. The entire episode took three hours, creating chaos in the area.

The city's wildlife official Utpal Bora told The AP that authorities have plans to release the animal at a wildlife park 120 miles (200 kilometers) west of the city. The AP report also noted that conservationists are saying that deforestation is causing leopards to move into populated areas.

You can watch a video of the incident from the UK Telegraph below:

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