By NIALL FIRTH

Last updated at 18:37 19 December 2007

A 50-year-old man has been savagely mauled to death by two tigers through the bars of their zoo cage as he tried to take a picture of them with his mobile phone.

The tourist is said to have clambered over a safety barrier in order to get a really good close-up picture of the Bengal tigers at the zoo in Guwahati in northeast India.

After he put his arm through the bars of the cage the two tigers attacked him and tore off his arm at the shoulder as his horrified wife and two children looked on helplessly.

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"It was an unfortunate accident and probably was a result of carelessness on the part of the man to have crossed the barricade," said Narayan Mahanta, a warden at the zoo.

"The man ignored warnings from keepers, crossed the first barrier and stretched his hand into the enclosure that housed a male and a female tiger," he said. "The animals grabbed his limb and tore it apart at the shoulder."

The man, named as Jayaprakash Bezbaruah, a government official from a neighbouring town, was rushed to hospital but he later died from a massive loss of blood.

"I have never encountered such a bizarre incident in my 11 years as a wildlife official," said Mahanta. "It was shocking."

The national animal of India and Bangladesh, Royal Bengal tigers are a protected species with only around 600 left in India, down from more than 100,000 a century ago.

According to a recent report at least four of India's 27 tiger reserves no longer contain tigers and it has been claimed that the animal is on the 'tipping point of extinction'.

This week it was reported that a tiger in Bangladesh which strayed out of a mangrove forest in the south-west of the country had been killed by local villagers.

Officials say that the forest - home to more than 400 Royal Bengal tigers - had been depleted of food following November's cyclone and so the tiger may have been near the village looking for food.