Mother drops three-year-old child into zoo bear enclosure  

An Uzbek mother depressed after her husband left to work in Russia, drops her three-year-old child into a bear enclosure in a zoo in the country’s capital Tashkent.
The woman, who faces a possible 15 year prison sentence for attempted murder, is one of many wives whose husbands leave the poverty of the central Asian country to find work in Russia.
Zookeepers caught the woman on camera approaching the bear enclosure, a few moments later dropping the child over the railings.
They ran into the enclosure and rescued the three-year-old girl, who was taken to hospital with a concussion sustained from the fall. Her life is not in danger.
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Officials said on Monday the unnamed woman faces charges of an attempted murder, with a maximum sentence of 15 years in jail.
They added that she had been despairing after her husband had left to work in Russia, as millions of Uzbek men do to escape poverty and unemployment at home.
The Uzbek health ministry said: “The woman has been depressed as her husband left for Russia and no longer lives with her.”
Officials identified the woman as a 30-year-old university lecturer who has two children and lives with her elderly father.
Footage released by Uzbek authorities over the weekend showed the grizzly bear initially scared off by something dropping from the sky into the moat just below the railings before he rushed to come closer to the girl and then went away.
“It’s scary to even think what could have happened if the bear had reacted to the child as a predator to a prey,” the zoo said.
With Russia’s economy growing, central Asian nations including Uzbekistan have been the main source of cheap, unskilled labour for the past 20 years.
Russia counts some two million labour migrants from Uzbekistan where seven per cent of the national gross domestic products comes from migrants’ remittances.
The massive labour migration is believed by some analysts to have been enabled by Russia’s open-door policy, contributing to the longevity of those countries’ autocratic regimes. The belief is that many would otherwise have had to deal with the growing discontent from millions of jobless young men, discontent that drove one mother to drop her three-year-old child into the bear enclosure.

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