UK group member mauled to death by polar bear

A polar bear mauled one person to death and left four other members of a British youth expeditions group seriously injured in an attack on Friday in the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, authorities said. "One person has died and four others are injured. Their injuries are serious," Liv Asta Oedegaard, a spokeswoman at the Svalbard district governor's office, told AFP. The British Schools Exploring Society (BSES), a youth development charity, said the group were part of one of their expeditions. The district governor's office in Svalbard said in a statement that authorities had received word of the attack near the Von Post glacier near the district capital of Longyearbyen at around 7:30 am (0530 GMT). "The four injured people are now at the Longyearbyen Hospital... An ambulance is now scheduled to fly the patients to the hospital in Tromsoe," in northern Norway, the statement said, adding the polar bear had been killed. A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "Our embassy in Oslo is urgently looking into reports of an incident in northern Norway."