When seven chimpanzees at a Swedish zoo broke free from their enclosure last winter, the keepers faced a terrible choice.This is the story of the most dramatic 72 hours of their lives

THE PROBLEMS BEGAN WHEN LINDA WAS T ABOUT 18 MONTHS OLD. For a year, she had lived in harmony with a Swedish couple and their three young children in Liberia.

Hers had not been an easy start in life. As a baby, in 1984, she saw her family shot by poachers in the Liberian jungle. Adult chimpanzees are sometimes sold as food in bushmeat markets in central and west Africa, but the poachers knew that they could get a higher price by offering the baby chimpanzee to westerners as a pet.

They took Linda to the town of Yekepa, where there was a base for a US-Swedish mining company. The company's director initially bought the baby chimpanzee, but it was soon decided that Linda, as she had now been named, would be happier growing up with other children. She was offered to another of the company's employees, Bo Bengtsson, and his wife, Pia, who had three young sons. The Swedish couple looked into Linda's light brown eyes and long, soulful face, and decided that they could offer the little chimp a better life as a member of their household.

When the town wasn't being drenched in monsoon rains, Linda spent long hot days outside playing with the boys and other children in the gated community of 100 or so houses that made up the neighborhood, climbing the tamarind tree behind the Bengtsson house. Although some of the neighbours found it a little tiresome that the energetic young chimpanzee enjoyed ripping up their flowerbeds, the Bengtssons loved Linda. Bo Bengtsson used to place her on the handlebars of his bike, and the two of them would go on rides along the Yah River. "It was very exciting for us, coming from up north, to take care of a chimpanzee baby," Bo told me, "and it was fascinating to study her. The same eyes, the same hands with fingerprints. She was almost exactly as we are."