Officers
surrounded the house in residential Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest
city, for seven hours before their suspect, a small, 66-year-old Chinese
woman, jumped into her car and sped off into the busy coastal city.
Yang Feng Glan managed to evade officers for several minutes, leading
them on a short car chase, but officials
with a specialized anti-poaching task force eventually closed in on her
with their vehicles, and she was soon caught, according to a source
familiar with the event.
Glan, who has been dubbed the “Queen of Ivory”, has been charged with smuggling 706 elephant tusks that authorities say are worth about $2.5 million, but a source close to the case who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing confidential information, claimed she is responsible for the deaths of at least 6,000 elephants.
“It’s the biggest arrest in the history of the country and possibly Africa,” he said ...
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* To learn more about this issue, read the EIA report 'Vanishing Point – Criminality, Corruption and the Devastation of Tanzania’s Elephants' at http://ht.ly/Tzu3d
--------------------------
According to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) there were more than 1.3 million African elephants in 1979, now there maybe as few as 400,000.
The agency has called Tanzania the epicenter of the illegal ivory trade. Recent data from a government-led elephant census suggests elephant numbers have dropped from 110,000 in 2009 to a little over 43,000.
EIA campaigns director Julian Newman played a pivotal role in the Vanishing Point report, a damning expose on the state of Tanzania’s poaching crisis. He called the string of arrests an important step in the fight against poaching.
“I think this approach is just what’s needed in Tanzania,” Newman said. “If you start taking some of these people out of the business by either arresting them or prosecuting them, they are obviously quite difficult to replace so you’ve disrupted quite an important syndicate.”
Newman estimates there are only three or four other major syndicates of this level operating in the country.
Read the full article at http://fusion.net/story/
#Tanzania #Africa #China #elephants #ivory
Image: Chinese national Young Feng Glan, centre, is escorted by police from Kisutu Resident's Magistrate Court in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, via fusion.net
Glan, who has been dubbed the “Queen of Ivory”, has been charged with smuggling 706 elephant tusks that authorities say are worth about $2.5 million, but a source close to the case who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing confidential information, claimed she is responsible for the deaths of at least 6,000 elephants.
“It’s the biggest arrest in the history of the country and possibly Africa,” he said ...
--------------------------
* To learn more about this issue, read the EIA report 'Vanishing Point – Criminality, Corruption and the Devastation of Tanzania’s Elephants' at http://ht.ly/Tzu3d
--------------------------
According to the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) there were more than 1.3 million African elephants in 1979, now there maybe as few as 400,000.
The agency has called Tanzania the epicenter of the illegal ivory trade. Recent data from a government-led elephant census suggests elephant numbers have dropped from 110,000 in 2009 to a little over 43,000.
EIA campaigns director Julian Newman played a pivotal role in the Vanishing Point report, a damning expose on the state of Tanzania’s poaching crisis. He called the string of arrests an important step in the fight against poaching.
“I think this approach is just what’s needed in Tanzania,” Newman said. “If you start taking some of these people out of the business by either arresting them or prosecuting them, they are obviously quite difficult to replace so you’ve disrupted quite an important syndicate.”
Newman estimates there are only three or four other major syndicates of this level operating in the country.
Read the full article at http://fusion.net/story/
#Tanzania #Africa #China #elephants #ivory
Image: Chinese national Young Feng Glan, centre, is escorted by police from Kisutu Resident's Magistrate Court in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, via fusion.net
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