Young lion found in a box in central Moscow

The lion was found by a passer-by who out of curiosity peeped through a hole in a large wooden box in the street, Komsomolskaya Pravda daily writes.

To the man's amazement, inside the box he saw a large animal that he identified as a lion. He called the police.

Soon the box was surrounded by a crowd, each of which wanted to take a look at the animal.

As the police were trying to find an organization ready to host a stray lion, the owner of the box arrived.

It appeared that he was transporting the lion, a young male of only 50 kilograms from a zoo in Omsk, Siberia, to a zoo in Kaluga, a city near Moscow.

He and the lion took a train to Moscow, and got off at the central Komsomolskaya train station where workers of Kaluga Zoo were to meet them and drive to Kaluga.

But for some reason they never showed up, and the man in charge of the lion went to look for a car that would take them to the final destination. He left the box with the animal in the yard of a nearby block of flats.

“I left it here because I knew nobody would dare to open the cage,” he said.