British gorilla expert killed in Cameroon

A British gorilla expert who once worked for the Dian Fossey Project has been killed in Cameroon. Dr Ymke Warren, who escaped Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, had her throat slit after she confronted an intruder in her home in the coastal town of Limbe.

Warren, 40, is thought to have discovered the man in the house she shared with her long-term partner and fellow British primatologist Aaron Nicholas at about 7.30am local time on Tuesday. It is believed the attacker, thought to be Cameroonian, hid himself in the couple's attic on Monday evening.  

According to a maid who witnessed the attack, the intruder lashed out at Warren with a machete when she confronted him. She was then bound and gagged and her throat was slit.

Nicholas, 42, had already left for work but returned minutes later to find his partner bleeding to death, the couple's neighbour, another British ape expert, Dr Bethan Morgan, said.

At the time of her death Warren - who has been described as a highly experienced primatologist - and Nicholas were both studying Cross River gorillas, one of west Africa's most threatened primate populations.

The case has echoes of the Rwanda slaying of American zoologist Dian Fossey - played by Sigourney Weaver in the 1988 movie Gorillas in the Mist. Fossey is thought to have been killed in 1985 by gorilla poachers, although her biographer Farley Mowat has dismissed this theory.

Warren had run the Dian Fossey Project after fleeing from Rwanda in the early 90s during the genocide, a former colleague Jillian Miller, director of The Gorilla Organisation in London, told the Daily Telegraph. "For Ymke to have survived all that and to have then been senselessly murdered 15 years later is terrible."

Morgan added: "We would all like to think that this is a robbery gone wrong, but we don't know."

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