A tiger - spotted roaming near Disneyland Paris theme park on Thursday and triggering an urgent police hunt - continued to remain on the loose for a second day on Friday.
A local woman sounded the alarm on Thursday morning after spotting the animal in a supermarket car park in the town of Montevrain - just a stone's throw from Disneyland Paris. Several more people later came forward saying they had seen the tiger on the prowl.
Backed up by a helicopter, more than 100 police officers and firefighters armed with tranquilising stun guns spent Thursday setting up a security perimeter and combing the area in the Seine-et-Marne district near the French capital, without success.
Authorities ordered residents to stay indoors and use cars to pick their children up from school.
"We are calling on residents to be careful, not to leave their homes and to stay in their vehicles," town hall official Cedric Tartaud-Gineste told AFP. "We've asked parents to come and fetch their children from school in cars so that no child goes home alone or without supervision... anyone who sees the tiger should call the police or the fire service."
Tartaud-Gineste said a security cordon covering an area about the size of four or five football pitches had been set up around a wooded area near the small town of Montevrain, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of Paris.
Experts said there was little doubt that the animal on the loose was a tiger.
"There is no doubt, it's a tiger," Robert Picaud, the head of a local group responsible for regulating pests, and who took part in the search. "The footprints are real and they were not made by a man. These fingerprints and photos, leave no room for doubt."
A spokesman for the town hall said, "The feline experts who analysed the paw prints said it was a large feline, probably a tiger, weighing 80 kg" (176.37 pounds).
The animal was most likely kept as a private pet, the spokesman said. The Parc des Felins, a wild cat animal park 29 kilometers (18 miles) from Montevrain, said all of its animals were accounted for. A nearby circus did not keep any tigers and EuroDisney, the operator of Disneyland Paris, said it has no tigers in its theme park either.
The last sighting was reported by a man at 1500 GMT on Thursday near a public park, prompting police to widen their search area. As darkness fell, officials suspended the search until daybreak.
Disneyland Paris calls itself Europe's No 1 tourist destination with 14.2 million visits in 2013. Officials at the theme park said no special precautions were taken on Friday inside the park due to the tiger.
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