A Kenyan man has described how he bit a python to try to escape its grip after the snake wrapped itself around him and dragged him up a tree.

Ben Nyaumbe, a farm manager, had a three-hour struggle with the snake after stepping on it in Malindi, Kenya, over the Easter weekend. After biting it on the tail, Nyaumbe managed to phone for help on his mobile.

"I stepped on a spongy thing on the ground and suddenly my leg was entangled with the body of a huge python," Nyaumbe told the Kenyan newspaper Daily Nation. "I had to bite it as I struggled, one hand incapacitated," he said.

He smothered the snake's head with his shirt to stop it biting him before police and villagers arrived to rescue him. The police tied a rope around Nyaumbe and the python, and pulled them down from the tree.

Read