A brown bear is serving a life sentence in prison alongside 730 dangerous offenders. Ekaterina – or Katya – was sent down in Kazakhstan for two separate attacks on people at a campsite where she was previously caged.

The Kostanay “strict regime” penal colony holds criminals, including killers, whose sentences do not exceed 25 years. But Ekaterina, jailed in 2004, is the only inmate serving a life sentence – and the only prisoner to have a swimming pool in her cell.
Ekaterina in her cell. She was sent to Kostanay aged seven because there was no zoo in the region that could take her.

Colony head Aslan Medybayev said: “She is friendly, not aggressive at all. Other prisoners visit her. She woke up a month ago from her hibernation.” The 22-year-old bear, who is looked after by prisoners, has become the prison’s symbol and a statue has been erected in her honour.

One prisoner Igor Tarakanov, 43, said: “She is calm, not aggressive. She adores sweet things that prisoners give her - sweets, biscuits, apples. He added: “Of course, communicating with an animal brightens my time here, makes it not so painful.”

Mr Medybayev said that Ekaterina had become less threatening as a result of her time at the jail, 435 miles north-west of Kazakhstan’s capital Nursultan, near the country’s border with Russia.

Ekaterina was caged at Belaya Yurta campsite after she was abandoned by a circus trainer as a cub. She mauled a boy who was feeding her and attacked a drunk who tried to shake hands.

Photos show Ekaterina in her cage, and her statue made by the prisoners.

SOURCE: https://www.mirror.co.uk

I kept going back to the jail part of the story to read it over maybe I missed something....I'm still not understanding how an animal could be made to serve a sentence for a crime it doesn't technically know it committed...
I mean....they are called animals for a reaaon...I would have understood if it was shot immediately in the process of saving the life of the humans it attacked

Lawyers help me out here, is that not why very little children and psychiatric patients aren't jailed for crimes...??

Poor baby