Bollywood star actor Salman Khan survives snakebite

Salman Khan, 56 years old, one of the biggest celebrities in Bollywood, told reporters on Monday (December 27th) that he had been bitten twice by a snake he was trying to chase from his country house near Bombay.

Armed with a staff, “I picked up the snake gently and pulled it out and then it wrapped around the stick and started to climb upward“, he declared. The villagers immediately started to “shout ‘hospital, hospital, hospital’ (…) There was so much commotion, the snake was a little poisonous, and it bit me againOnce at the hospital, the actor received an anti-venom serum, before being kept for observation and coming out after six hours.

“Bad boy” of Indian cinema, Salman Khan, although controversial, is the object of a real cult in his country. He was convicted of the death of a homeless man who was hit while driving his car in 2002 before obtaining a resounding acquittal.

In 2018, he was sentenced to five years in prison for illegally slaughtering protected animals twenty years ago, which he has always denied. Salman Khan claimed that the snake that caused the bite was released into the jungle.

India recorded around 58,000 snakebite-related deaths per year – or 160 per day – between 2000 and 2019, according to a study published last year.