NEW DELHI — Outside the white marble facade of the imposing Taj Mahal, tourists are facing a menace: gangs of hungry, rosy-bottomed monkeys. They bite. They scratch. Occasionally, they kill.

Now, Indian security guards are cracking down, taking to the streets of Agra, India, where the monument is, to scare off the animals. Their weapon of choice?

Slingshots.

“Foreign tourists get very excited to see the monkeys,” said Dineshor Tongbram, the deputy commandant of a security force for the Taj Mahal. “They try to go closer to them and become victims.”

The threat of an attack is real. Last May, two French tourists were reportedly confronted by a mob of monkeys and bitten. In November, a monkey snatched a local baby from his mother, bit him and then dumped him on a neighbor’s roof. The boy later died of his injuries.