An elephant brought in to help a Maharashtra forest department team track down and capture a man-eating tigress broke free of its chains late on Tuesday and killed a woman, who officials said probably came in the way of the lumbering hulk.

Gajaraj, around 35 years old, injured another man before forest officials caught the rogue tusker on Wednesday morning in a neighbouring district.

A.K. Mishra, principal chief conservator of forests (wildlife), said the elephant had seriously jeopardised the operation to capture T1, the tigress suspected to have killed 13 people between June 1, 2016, and August 28, 2018.

“A probe has been launched to find out how this happened,” Mishra said.

The tigress, moving around in Maharashtra’s Pandharkawada forest with its two cubs, has been eluding the nearly 200-strong force the government has deployed to track it down.

Forest officials from Madhya Pradesh too had joined the search with a team of four elephants following renewed pressure on the forest department to kill or capture T1 after three of the tigress’s latest fatal attacks were reported in August.

Gajaraj was brought from Maharashtra’s Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve to assist in the operation, which resumed from September 22.

Late on Tuesday night, Gajaraj broke free of its chains at the camp in Sawarkheda from where the operation is being conducted.

Twenty kilometres away from the camp, in Chahand village in Yavatmal district, Archana Moreswar Kulsange, 35, had stepped out of her home to relieve herself and is suspected to have come in the way of the tusker.

Mukinda Sawai, a 70-year-old man, was injured in Pohana, a village in neighbouring Wardha district, before mahouts and forest department officials caught up with the rogue elephant around 10.30am on Wednesday.

This was not the first time that Gajaraj had turned rogue. On March 23 this year the tusker had been sent back to Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve after he injured two men.

“Gajaraj has been sent back to Tadoba. The situation is peaceful now,” M. Rajkumar, superintendent of police, Yavatmal, said.

Forest department sources said the remaining four elephants had also been shifted from the Sawarkheda camp after Wednesday morning’s incident to pre-empt a backlash from villagers.

“We will have to work out our strategy again (to capture the tigress),” forest officer Mishra said.

T1’s notoriety has reached the Supreme Court, which had last month dismissed a petition from wildlife activists to turn down an order from Bombay High Court’s Nagpur bench allowing the forest department to either tranquillise or kill the tigress.

The forest department has kept on standby a Hyderabad-based sharpshooter, Shafath Ali Khan.

“Khan was asked to join the team but after an uproar from wildlife activists he has been asked to stay put,” a senior forest official said.