Polar bear shot dead after wounding cruise ship worker

OSLO: A polar bear was shot dead after attacking a German cruise ship worker on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, the authorities said Sunday. The unnamed man in his 40’s suffered head injuries shortly after landing on Spitzbergen island. He was accompanying a tourist expedition from the MS Bremen of Hapag-Lloyd Cruises on Saturday. “The bear was killed by another employee on the boat,” police commissioner Ole Jakob Malmo told AFP. Hapag-Lloyd Cruises said it was “self-defence”. “We greatly regret this incident,” said company spokesman Moritz Krause. The injured employee was flown by helicopter to the local capital Longyearbyen and then on to Tromso on the mainland in the evening, Malmo said.