IPSWICH: A northern bottlenose whale that swam into a river near the eastern English town of Ipswich was killed by veterinarians yesterday after it got stranded, an official said.

Crowds gathered along River Orwell to watch divers try to coax the 15-foot juvenile whale into open water and back to the North Sea. When that failed, the whale was humanely destroyed, said Trevor Weeks, of the British Divers Marine Life Rescue group.

Experts said the whale probably got lost after leaving Norwegian waters on a journey that normally would have taken it north of Scotland, past Iceland and the Faroe Islands.