In the first minutes of 1 January 2020, fire destroyed the entire ape house at the zoo in Krefeld, a city in western Germany near the Dutch border. The zoo said more than 30 animals were killed, among them five orangutans, two gorillas, a chimpanzee, several smaller monkeys, fruit bats and birds. Police said sky lanterns released to celebrate the New Year were the likely cause.
Firefighters received the first emergency calls at 12:38 a.m. The zoo stayed closed on New Year's Day.
What police said about the lanterns
Gerd Hoppmann, head of Krefeld's criminal police, told the Associated Press: "People reported seeing those sky lanterns flying at low altitude near the zoo and then it started burning." Witnesses described cylindrical paper lanterns with small fires inside flying in the night sky shortly after midnight.
Investigators found partly burnt lanterns on the ground nearby. They were made of white paper, about 34 centimetres long, with an opening at the bottom where a small flame hangs; some carried handwritten notes. Sky lanterns are illegal in Krefeld and in most of Germany.
On 2 January the AP reported that a mother and her two adult daughters had gone to the police on New Year's Day, after a police news conference, and said they had released five lanterns bought online. According to the police, the women said they had not known that the lanterns were banned in Germany. The case was being investigated as possible negligent arson. Hoppmann called their decision to come forward courageous.
Two chimpanzees survived
Firefighters rescued two chimpanzees: Bally, a 40-year-old female, and Limbo, a younger male. Both had burns but were in stable condition. "It's close to a miracle that Bally, a 40-year-old female chimpanzee, and Limbo, a younger male, survived this inferno," zoo director Wolfgang Dressen said.
Gorilla Kidogo and six members of his family, kept in the separate Gorilla Garden next door, were not harmed. Dressen called the fire "an unfathomable tragedy" and said many of the dead animals belonged to species threatened with extinction in the wild.
Krefeld Zoo and its ape house
Krefeld Zoo opened on 22 May 1938 and covers about 14 hectares; it usually draws about 400,000 visitors a year. The ape house that burned, the Affentropenhaus, opened in 1975: a greenhouse-like building of about 2,000 square metres kept at tropical conditions for great apes, smaller monkeys, bats and birds. The zoo's separate Gorilla Garden opened in 2012.
According to the AP, the ape house, built in the 1970s, had no fire detectors or sprinklers, which were not required when it was built.
Photo: DER UNFASSBARE / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Sources: CNN, The Agro News (Online Desk), ABC News (Australia), CBS News and AP, Fox News and AP, Global News, HuffPost, Wikipedia (Krefeld Zoo)
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