A lion attacked and killed a 26-year-old man in a village near the Maasai Mara National Park.
This has built tension after locals said Moses Sironka Kipila was attacked and killed by the lion at Enkilata village on May 17.
Police and Kenya Wildlife Service officials visited the scene and established that the deceased was among a group of villagers who chased about seven lions that had earlier attacked their herds of cattle.
It was then that the lion turned on the victim and attacked him killing him.
The body was moved to the Narok County Referral Hospital mortuary pending autopsy.
Tension is rising in the area amid fears of retaliation by locals to kill the wild animals, which strayed from the nearby Maasai Mara National Park.
Officials are working to drive the animals back to the park and put measures to tame a repeat of the same.
It comes in the wake of the killing of 10 lions in Amboseli by villagers in a conflict.
This followed an earlier incident where some lions killed the goats of a villager in the area.
One of Kenya’s oldest wild lions was killed by the herders in Amboseli, Kajiado and the government has expressed concern as six more lions were speared at another village last Saturday bringing to 10 the number killed last week alone.
The male lion named Loonkiito was 19 years old and was described as frail by the Kenya Wildlife Service who said it wandered out of the Amboseli national park into a village in search of food on Thursday night.
Six other lions from the same national park were speared by herders after they killed 12 goats in the Mbirikani area, Kajiado county.
The deaths brought to 10 the number of lions killed by herders last week in an escalated human-wildlife conflict that has worried the government.
Tennyson Williams, regional director for Africa at the World Society for the Protection of Animals, said the loss of habitat and climate change threatened the number of lions in the wild and that their future looked “bleak“.
He said policies aimed at enabling communities to co-exist with wildlife were vital.
The government and conservation groups have a compensation program for herders whose livestock is killed by wild animals.
But herders have become more protective after losing livestock to a drought that has been termed as the worst in decades in the East Africa region.
