Thai woman rescued after being trapped for two hours in coils of 4-metre python | Thailand

A Thai woman has described how she was trapped in the coils of a 20-kilogram (44-pound) python for about two hours in her home before rescuers were able to free her.

Arom Arunroj, 64, was bitten several times by the snake that had entered her home in Samut Prakan, a province south of Bangkok. She said she was washing dishes at around 8.30pm when she suddenly felt something bite her leg. “I looked at it and it was a snake,” she said in an interview broadcast by Thai media.

Arom said she had tried to fight off the snake and screamed for help, but no one heard her.

At one point she grabbed the snake’s head in the hope that it would let go, “but it didn’t, it just kept strangling me.”

A neighbour finally heard her cries for help and called for assistance at 10pm, Thai media reported.

Police Senior Sergeant Anusorn Wongmali Anusorn said he had broken down Arom’s door after hearing a weak voice coming from inside. “She had probably been strangled for some time because her skin was pale,” he said.

“It was a python, a big one. I saw a bite mark on its leg, but I knew there could be one somewhere else too,” he said, adding that he tried to help by pushing the snake away.

The python was four metres long and weighed more than 20 kilos. In the footage filmed by the emergency services, Arom can be seen sitting on the ground with the snake coiled around her waist.

Police were joined by members of the She Poh Tek Tung Foundation, a rescue organisation, and Arom was taken to hospital for treatment. Pythons are not venomous, but their bites can cause infections. They kill their prey by wrapping it up and suffocating it.

According to the country’s national health security office, around 12,000 people were treated for snakebites and other poisonous animals in Thailand in 2023. According to government figures, 26 people died from snakebites last year.

Last month, in the same province, a python bit a man on the testicle while he was sitting on the toilet on the second floor of his home. The man grabbed the snake to prevent it from escaping and tried to get it out of the toilet by hitting its head with his hand and a toilet brush, until a neighbour responded to his calls for help.

He was prescribed antibiotics and felt pain in the area, he told Thai media outlet Khaosod English, adding that he was traumatised by the attack.