Congo Rangers Break Suspected Gorilla Traffic Ring
Date: 26-Sep-07
Country: CONGO
Author: Joe Bavier
Poachers and gunmen have killed at least nine mountain
gorillas this year and a possible revival in trafficking poses
another threat to the mighty beasts, of whom just 700 remain,
spread between Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Rwanda.
Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature (ICCN)
rangers arrested two men after a weeks-long investigation into a
suspected trafficking ring, said Samantha Newport, spokeswoman
for Wildlife Direct, which supports conservation in Africa.
Rangers said in a blog on the organisation's website
http://wildlifedirect.org/blogAdmin/gorilla/ that they had
infiltrated the trafficking ring, whose members said they had
two gorillas for sale at US$8,000 each.
But in the operation the rangers found the badly decomposed
remains of a female gorilla of 3 or 4 years old, who they
estimated had been dead for about a week, and who the two
suspects said had been taken from the Virunga National Park.
Newport said that after years of efforts to curb the trade
in endangered species, the ICCN had thought trafficking in
mountain gorillas "was pretty much wiped out ... they were quite
surprised when they found this out".
But she said it was unclear what the gorillas were being
trafficked for -- or if other individuals may already have been
smuggled out of the park and sold.
"It is entirely possible ... We've had the civil war for 10
years and the country is still coming out of it. The tracking
and monitoring has been limited by the stability or lack of
stability in the region," she told Reuters by phone.
Congo's mountain gorillas have weathered years of warfare in
Congo's east -- even though more than 150 rangers have been
killed trying to protect the area's five national parks from
poachers and armed groups.
But this year at least nine mountain gorillas from Virunga,
Africa's oldest national park, have been killed, some to be
eaten by rebel fighters or sold as "bush meat".
In the worst incident, five gorillas were slaughtered and
abandoned inside Virunga park, in an attack conservationists
linked to a power struggle between local government agents
trying to preserve the park and people profiting from illicit
charcoal made from its trees.
Earlier this month Tutsi fighters loyal to renegade
Congolese army General Laurent Nkunda raided ranger stations at
the heart of Virunga and seized rifles, looted equipment and
supplies and forced the rangers and their families to flee,
halting their work monitoring the rare primates.
