Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) rangers recovered four tusks and arrested a suspect after two jumbos were killed at a private ranch in Laikipia in the Mount Kenya region last week, a KWS official said on Monday.
”Two elephants were killed at Kuki Gallman Ranch and we were immediately informed by the ranch owner, and when we sent in the rangers, we managed to intercept a suspect with the four pieces of ivory in the neighbouring Baringo district,” KWS assistant director
Josiah Achoki told AFP by telephone on Monday morning.
”We suspect he was a third party, who had bought the ivory from poachers,” Achoki said.
Last April, four elephant poachers of Somali origin were killed in an exchange of fire with game rangers at Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, after they had gunned down a family of 10 elephants on March 28.
One poacher was killed by KWS officials at the time of the slaughter, but the others fled to neighbouring Somalia, ”only to return with a 36-strong reinforcement, on a mission to poach and
seek revenge,” Achoki said then.
KWS officials still believe that the recent upsurge in poaching could be linked to the desire by some countries to start stockpiling ivory ahead of a meeting in November of the Covention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in Chile.
Cites is an international authority regulating the management of endangered wildlife on the part of its signatory member countries and makes decisions on matters such as hunting bans and ivory stocks.
Cites decided four years ago to partly lift a 1989 moratorium on trade in elephant tusks, permitting Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana to start selling old ivory stocks to clients in Japan.
At a meeting in Nairobi in April 2000, Cites claimed that the move had not led to a rise in poaching, saying that only 235 elephants had been killed across the continent in 1998 and 1999. – Sapa-AFP