Arrested traffickers pose with Seized Ivory |
Two
traffickers have been arrested transporting ivory tusks and a gun along the
Campo - Ebolowa road by officials of the South Regional Delegation of Forestry
and Wildlife. A woman was also arrested for providing a hunting rifle that was
found in their possession alongside the ivory and a military uniform.
The two, aged 41-year-old each, were
travelling on board a car with the products loaded in the boot when the car was
checked at the Meyo Centre Carrefour by wildlife officials who had prior
information of the nature of the products the car was transporting. The
operation was carried out with the collaboration of the judicial police in
Ebolowa and with the technical assistance of a non-governmental organization
called LAGA (EAGLE Cameroon).
Wildlife
officials and plain clothes policemen had been monitoring the movement of the
car that halted at the junction in Meyo. They immediately approached and
blocked the car at both ends. Two men were found at the back seats and ordered
to step out. After the arrest, Senior
Police Superintendent Henrick Walter Elouna who is the Head of the South
Regional Judicial Police declared: “I was approached by the South Regional
Delegate of Forestry and Wildlife, to give a hand to his collaborators and the
NGO called LAGA”. When the team arrived the ground they found the car and
Elouna declared: “we arrested two poachers who had killed two elephants”.
The car was equally searched and a
Carabine 450 rifle was found inside according to Nchenghe Pius Arrey, a
wildlife controller who was part of the team. He said: “We discovered four
elephant tusks and a gun inside”. A Carabine 450 rifle was found in a bag that
equally contained a saw, a calculator, a military fatigue, a scale and a torch.
These are handful equipment for operating in the forests, killing elephants,
cutting off the tusks and weighing them.
The second bag contained four ivory tusks cut into 7 pieces. The two
were taken to the judicial police where preliminary interrogations revealed
more information.
One of the two suspects is a poacher
who had allegedly just killed three elephants and the second was the trafficker
who had the poacher under his employ. According to one source, further questioning
would have revealed that the gun was handed to them by the wife of a police
superintended who died some 4 years ago. She was also arrested at her residence
where two other guns she possessed had earlier been stolen. The military fatigue that was found among the
products, it was revealed, was given to them by a colonel.
The products, preliminary
investigations indicate, were retrieved early morning on the day of the arrest
in Akak some 15 km from Campo by the two who were travelling to Ebolowa to sell
the ivory. They had successfully passed two police check points, the Mann and
Meban checkpoints and were very close to Ebolowa where it would have been very
difficult to sort them out. When police searched the contents of their bags, a
crowd started gathering and some eyewitnesses exclaimed it was their fist time
of seeing elephant ivory. Two of the four ivory tusks weighed over 33kg,
indicating the huge size of the elephant that was recently killed to obtain the
tusks.
The South Region is considered by
wildlife law enforcement experts as the hotbed for ivory trafficking with
localities such as Djoum, Ambam and Ebolowa the epicenters. The Regional
Delegation is stepping up collaborative efforts to ensuring enforcement
measures are adapted to the intensity of the trafficking.
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