Malmö’s runaway python recaptured after escape

The snake’s owner has notified the municipality’s Environmental Administration that the reptile had been found, according to the radio station P4 Malmöhus.

“He said that the snake was found, but I did not understand if he himself had it at the time,” environmental inspector Carl Runsbech told the radio station.

The animal was 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,” he said.

It was the second time the snake had slithered away in less than a week.

The snake made its first bid for freedom last 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.

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.