Indian billionaire’s son offers to house Pablo Escobar’s hippos at his private zoo

Hippos float in the lagoon at the Hacienda Nápoles theme park, once the private estate of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar who imported three female hippos and one male decades ago. Photograph: Fernando Vergara/AP

It remains one of the strangest conundrums in modern zoological history – what to do with the descendants of Pablo Escobar’s hippos?

The animals – herbivores native to sub-Saharan Africa – were originally imported into Colombia by the drug kingpin for his own entertainment. But the beasts and their offspring were left to roam free after his death in 1993.