YAKUTSK, October 13 (RIA Novosti) – A private circus troupe traveling through eastern Siberia lost its animal performers when the tour van went up in flames on the road, local police reported Sunday.
The human artists managed to leave the vehicle in time, but failed to rescue a snake and a lizard used in performances, said a police spokesman in Russia's republic of Sakha.
He did not specify the reptiles’ species or say whether the troupe, which hails from St. Petersburg, had any more animals.
The van – which was taking the circus to a show in the city of Mirny, the capital of Russia’s diamond mining industry – apparently caught fire as a result of faulty wiring, the spokesman said.
This is not the first time circus animals have met such a fate in the Siberian republic: In 2011, a Ukrainian circus bus was torched, killing a she-bear and some pigeons. The arsonists were never found.
In 2009, eight tigers and a lioness from a circus in southern Russia’s Krasnodar suffocated in a locked refrigerator transporting them to the regional capital Yakutsk, also for a performance that never took place.
