A war veteran who travelled for five days to save a lion and a wolf from a zoo in war-hit Ukraine previously sold his home to help fight ISIS.
Brits Tim Locks and Jonathan Weaving undertook the 2,600-mile trip after crowdfunding the money.
They yesterday took the wild animals out of the country via a hired minibus as they the crew lifted the creatures out of their enclosures via crane.
The friends then hit the road, taking the lion and wolf to Romania to a zoo in the northeastern city of Radauti.
But they came within a few miles of the frontline with Moscow’s troops close by in the south east of the war-ravaged country.
Fearless Tim said it was hardest thing he has ever done as they beat the curfew by just 35 minutes.
They even declared their cargo as a "lion and a wolf" at checkpoints and despite some stunned looked, they never doubted for a moment they were doing the right thing.
"It took three hours as the crane driver and digger driver didn’t speak a word of English, and we don’t speak Ukrainian, so there was an interpreter who translated everything," the animal lover told Metro.
"We carried the wolf out in one go and got the cage away and got the door shut and it was tea and biscuits all round, with everybody asking how we managed to do it.
"It was quite a nice little zoo with tigers and bears and we stayed for a couple of hours."
"No one thought we would pull it off," he said. "But we managed to get the lion in and he was happy."
It is not the only big statement the 45-year-old has made.
In 2016 he sold everything he owned, including his home, and shut down his construction business after watching news reports of the atrocities carried out by IS terrorists.
Despite no military training he says he relied on "common sense" as he battled alongside Kurds against the Islamic State.
He told the Mirror previously: “I thought, ‘This is the worst thing that’s happening in the world and everyone says they’re appalled but they don’t do anything about it.’
“I started to question myself. I’m saying that people should be doing stuff but what am I doing about it?”
Tim was on the front line in Kurdistan and inside the building had been IS jihadists, also known as Daesh.
He said bluntly: “I didn’t feel anything towards the people I was killing. I had long since stopped seeing Daesh as human, so I had no empathy for them.
“I may as well have been shooting rubber ducks at the fairground.”
