On Saturday morning, 43-year-old Ana Oros was attacked by a pack of 7-8 dogs while running in the Lacul Morii area of Bucharest. Also there, she was also attacked less than a year ago.
In April of last year, she was bitten while jogging near Lacul Morii dike. Then, she was saved by two cyclists who were passing through the area at that time. He arrived at the hospital with multiple head and limb injuries.
On Saturday, a citizen saw from a distance how the woman was being attacked by dogs, but when he got there it was already too late. He called 112, but the medical team that arrived at the scene could only confirm the death.
Attacked last year, too
Less than a year ago, in April, the victim was attacked by the same stray dogs in the same place in the Capital. And then, the woman had gone out for a run.
In April 2022, she was much luckier and escaped alive. Then, she was found and saved from the fangs of the animals by two cyclists passing through the area.
She was rushed to the hospital with injuries to her head, hands and legs and underwent emergency surgery.
Institutions blame each other
A day after Ana’s death, the institutions that could have taken measures to prevent such a tragedy from happening are blaming each other.
The Authority for the Supervision and Protection of Animals (ASPA) has removed more than 120 dogs from the Morii Lake area since April 2022, when the victim made a complaint after being attacked in the same area, ASPA spokeswoman Cătălina Trănescu said on Saturday . “Capture does not solve the cause, but the effect”, claimed the ASPA representative.
She said the Lacul Morii area is known by the institution as an area with stray dogs, stressing that it is not “only ASPA’s problem”.
She admitted ASPA is responsible for managing stray dogs on the public domain in Bucharest, but the institution should have the support of the local sector police, the National Police, which has powers on ASPA, namely to check dog owners , the owners of animals, if these dogs are microchipped, according to the law, if they are sterilized, if they are kept on private property properly fenced so that they do not have access to go out into the public domain.
The ASPA spokeswoman also said that the land in the Lacul Morii area is so extensive that you can barely see the dam where the woman ran and reached the place where she was later attacked by a pack of dogs.
“At the moment our crews are in the field, we are acting and trying to catch these dogs who are supposed to be the ones who made the attack this morning. Once you get to the middle of the field… you can’t see with the naked eye, the territory is so big that you can’t see the other end of the dike from where the woman ran and came here, in the middle. She did not choose the option of the dike to return to the houses, but chose to come to the field. This event happened right in the middle of the field. It is a very difficult territory to operate.”
On the other hand, the Sector 6 City Hall claimed that the Local Police of the sector did not receive reports about the dogs in the Lacul Morii area and that the only institution that must monitor and collect the dogs is the Animal Supervision and Protection Authority (ASPA). The town hall also claimed, in a press release sent on Saturday, that the land on which the victim was attacked is a private one – it would have belonged to CAP, and the appropriations would have been made by the Chiajna authorities.
“The land belonged to CAP, and the appropriations were made by the Chiajna authorities. It is currently owned by three people,” the city hall says.
The mayor of sector 6, Ciprian Ciucu, who reports to the Local Police, reacted on Sunday morning with a message on Facebook in which he claims that he is not running away from responsibility, but that he was waiting for a reaction from the mayor of the capital, Nicușor Dan, because this would be the main responsibility, with the municipality having ASPA under it.
He says that an internal investigation has been launched at the Local Police Sector 6, but he accuses ASPA, saying that “instead of collecting the dogs from the streets, it does awareness campaigns”. Ciucu explains his delayed reaction by claiming that he waited for the position of Mayor General Nicușor Dan, “the one who decides ASPA policies, allocates budgets and who is the only one who has the institutional tools to solve the dog problem”.
ASPA announced on Facebook that on Sunday morning it resumed the action of capturing dogs from the field in the Lacul Morii area. “The territory is very large, it is an open field, the dogs do not allow to approach them, and for these reasons the action is extremely difficult. Up to this moment, one dog has been captured by remote tranquilization”, reported the Animal Supervision and Protection Authority, the institution subordinate to the Capital City Hall that deals with stray dogs in Bucharest.