27 animals found

Snake jester escaped from poisonous mamba once before

The bite of the green mamba is considered fatal.(Bild: Klemens Groh)

The Styrian police in Seckau and Graz made a shocking discovery: officers discovered highly poisonous mambas, cobras and rattlesnakes in an apartment on Thursday after the death of an 83-year-old man. The owner had also been known to the "Krone" for decades.

It is dark and smells of stale air and excrement. In narrow corridors where you can barely turn around, green and black mambas, a puff adder, rattlesnakes, a spitting cobra - animals that can kill a person with a single bite - as well as an anaconda and a four-metre-long python lurk in cages stacked on top of each other.

Reptile expert Werner Stangl has seen a lot of creepy-crawlies - but this operation on Thursday in Straßganger Straße in Graz pushed him to his limits.