Nairobi - Kenyan wildlife rangers in choppers killed a pair of rogue elephants this week after a series of fatal attacks on people in incidents highlighting growing human-animal conflict, officials said on Thursday.

The rampaging bulls, blamed by locals for leading larger groups of jumbos onto farms to raid crops, were shot dead on Sunday and Wednesday near the famed Maasai Mara National Reserve and a ranch in central Kenya, the officials said.

In addition, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said it was tracking a third elephant believed to have been involved in an attack Monday in which one woman was killed.
 

On Wednesday, KWS rangers tracked down and killed an elephant suspected of three fatal attacks on humans near the central town of Nanyuki after it raided a ranch and injured a farmhand, an official said.

"We had been tracking its movement for the last two years, but with the help of a helicopter we managed to bring it down yesterday," said the deputy KWS warden for the area, Richard Lemarikat.

"We have been monitoring it because we think it has killed three people in the last two years," he told AFP from Nanyuki, about 130km north of Nairobi.

In a separate incident Monday in the nearby Aberdare forest, more than 10 elephants attacked a group of women collecting firewood, killing one of them and prompting authorities there to begin a hunt.

"About seven women were attacked," Jane Gitau, a KWS warden in the town of Nyahururu adjacent to the forest, told AFP. "One was injured and she died on her way to hospital."

Meanwhile, KWS rangers in helicopters on Sunday drove several large groups of elephants off farms on the outskirts of the Maasai Mara reserve during an operation in which they shot dead a bull believed to have killed a man that day, officials said.

Conflict between humans and wildlife, particularly elephants, is on the increase in Kenya as population pressures, drought and other weather conditions push farmers onto once unused land in many parts of the country.