Mexico City ? A gardener detained along with more than a dozen members of an alleged drug trafficking ring testified that police threatened him to feed him to lions and tigers during a raid at a Mexico City mansion, a newspaper reported Friday.

The Oct. 16 raid — in which police seized exotic animals from a private zoo at a sprawling estate — has been marred by allegations of abuse and corruption against the police who conducted the operation.

The Reforma newspaper says it had access to a court hearing Tuesday in which the gardener, Fernando Maya, testified that police beat him, gave him electric shocks and threatened to rape his wife if he did not reveal the whereabouts of the owner of the house, who remains at large.

“They kept saying, where is he? And that they were going to throw me to the lions, they were going to throw me to the tigers, which had not eaten,” the newspaper quoted Maya as saying. “I told them they should just kill me.”

Maya also claimed that a police commander tried to goad a monkey into scratching him, but the animal ended up swiping the officer instead.