Python on the loose in Malmö – again

Police were on Monday morning still hunting for the reptile, which on Sunday night went missing for the second time in two days.

The reptile is thought to have escaped through a crack in the window of the owner’s car, which was parked on Hyacintgatan in the southern Swedish city.

“At 3am the owner rang police. He had left it there for a short while,” Hans Nilsson, a spokesperson for Southern Police told Dagens Nyheter on Monday.

He described the fact that the snake was on the loose again as “absolutely incredible”.

“It’s quite cold this morning, so it will be well-located and squeezed in somewhere,” Nilsson told TT.

“It’s not that the serpent is dangerous to people, but it can be an unpleasant experience. We hope someone will call early in the morning so we can send out a car,” he said.

The snake made its first bid for freedom on Saturday morning before being discovered in a stairwell by a man on his way to work.

The man called police who then alerted Frank Madsen from the Malmö Reptile Centre, who brought to snake to the centre.

“She started drinking immediately and made herself comfortable in the heat, so everything went well,” Madsen told TT on Sunday.

The snake was eventually retrieved by its baffled owner who said he did not know how it could have got there.

This isn’t the first snake escape to rattle Sweden in recent months.

In July a suspicious snake was captured after a passer-by spotted it as it slithered down Ringvägen on the capital's Södermalm island.

Meanwhile, a python which went on the slither in a Malmö park earlier in July is believed to still be at large somewhere in Pildammsparken in southern Sweden.

“We've been looking in the pond and the areas around the pond, but it's like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Joakim Ljungström at Malmö Reptile Centre told southern Swedish daily Sydsvenskan last month.