Teen mauled to death by bear in front of boyfriend while on hiking trip

A teenager has died after she was attacked by a bear on a hiking trip in Romania.

Maria Diana, 19, was hiking in the Bucegi mountains with her boyfriend when a bear appeared on the hiking track.

Tragically Ms. Diana was on the phone to emergency services when the bear grabbed her leg and dragged her off a 400-foot cliff.

Rescuers said Ms. Diana’s injuries were “incompatible with life.”

Dan Banu, head of the local mountain rescue service, told local media: “She was terrified…you can tell, she was screaming: ‘The bear is getting closer and closer!’

“It was all happening live, the [emergency] dispatcher was on the phone and [her partner] was shouting that they were being attacked by the bear and that he had taken the girl. It was terrible!”

“He told us that the bear grabbed the girl by the leg and at one point he didn’t see what he did to her.”

When rescuers went to recover Ms. Diana’s body they found the bear circling it.

The bear was shot dead.

Ms. Diana’s boyfriend, who was unharmed in the incident, said they had been climbing towards the Spumoasa waterfall when the bear appeared.

When rescuers arrived on the scene, they found the snarling beast circling the body. The ‘aggressive’ predator tried to attack them and was then shot dead.

The victim’s boyfriend, whose identity has also not been revealed, witnessed the horrific attack but was unharmed.

“It was unexpected. I tried to scare the bear, but the misfortune happened. I’d rather it had been me,” he told Stirile Pro TV.

President of Salvamont Romania, the country’s mountain rescue services, Sabin Corniou said: “From the information we have, the bear attacked the young woman on the trail, dragged her into the vegetation next to the trail, and somewhere in this vegetation dropped her into a chasm and fell there. The bear came down after her.”

“My colleagues went down into the abyss, where unfortunately, the injuries the victim had were incompatible with life.”

Mr. Corniou said the aggressive behavior was unusual for bears who usually lash out when feeling threatened or if there was food present.

“But here, it seems we are already talking about a direct attack, and this is not typical of bears. It needs to be seen exactly what influenced it. Maybe the heat, maybe some disease the animal is suffering from,” he said.

“We need to see exactly what changed its behavior so radically that we end up with such events’”

Wild animal specialist Carmen Strungaru said it was unlikely that the bear dragged Ms. Diana off a cliff.

“It is more likely that the girl, frightened, tried to run away, fell into the abyss and the bear with her,” they said.

Romania is home to Europe’s largest population of brown bears – up to an estimated 8,000 – outside Russia.