An eight-year-old Namibian female cheetah named Nabha died at Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park on Saturday, ANI reported.

This came a week after Nabha was injured likely during a hunting attempt inside its soft release enclosure, the news agency quoted the field director of the Cheetah Project as saying.

The cheetah was being treated for a week but succumbed to her injuries on Saturday.

The national park now has 26 cheetahs. Nine of them are adults and the 17 others are cubs.

Of the 26 cheetahs, 16 are in the wild and have “adapted well” to the national park’s habitat.

Since 2023, at least 14 cheetahs have died.

Nabha was among the cheetahs who were translocated to India from Namibia under the Union government’s Project Cheetah.

In September 2022, cheetahs were reintroduced to India seven decades after the species was declared extinct in the country.

The cheetah was officially declared extinct by the Indian government in 1952. Before that, the wild cats were last recorded in the country in 1948, when three cheetahs were shot in the Sal forests in Chhattisgarh’s Koriya District.

Also read: The dark clouds over India’s cheetah project