Both animals appear to have made a grueling 200-mile swim from Greenland to the North Atlantic island nation.
Following last week’s outrage over the first killing, Icelandic officials had vowed to capture any polar bears in the future, then fly them back to Greenland or give them to a zoo.
And while the chief veterinarian from the Copenhagen zoo had been flown in to help capture the latest polar bear immigrant, a police spokesman said they had “no other choice” but to kill the animal after it charged a group of reporters who had rushed to chronicle the latest Arctic arrival.
Some questioned why the police failed for a second week in a row to keep people away from the animals until they could be captured.
Polar bear sightings have been rare in Iceland until this summer. The two arrivals in such a brief period could lend credence to warnings that global warming is creating more perilous conditions in the bears’ habitats.
