Nairobi | Monday
FOUR elephant poachers have been killed in an exchange of fire with game rangers at Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, an official said on Sunday.
Josiah Achoki, assistant director for operations of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) rangers told AFP the incident occurred on Friday.
”We tracked them down and … around 16:15 pm we engaged them at Galana Ranch bordering Tsavo East, killing four of them, all of Somali origin,” Achoki said.
His unit, he added, has been guarding families of elephants around the clock since a gang of poachers gunned down 10 of the animals in Tsavo on March 28 for their tusks.
One poacher was killed by KWS officials at the time of the slaughter but the others fled to neighbouring Somalia, he said.
”(They) recently came back with reinforcements … on a mission to poach and seek revenge,” Achoki said.
”Our intelligence found out that a 36-strong gang returned with an assortment of deadly weapons and split into groups, eight of whom were sighted in Tsavo East,” he said.
That group was confronted on Friday, leading to the fatal shoot-out.
Achoki said operations had been launched on the ground and in the air to track down the four poachers who escaped on Friday.
”All families of elephants in Kenyan national parks are now guarded 24 hours a day by our KWS fighting unit,” he said.
KWS officials believe that an upsurge in poaching could be linked to the desire by some countries to start stockpiling ivory ahead of a meeting in November of the Convention 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.
But the head of Born Free wildlife protection organisation, conservationist Will Travers, maintained that poaching was on the increase, with some 30 795 elephants killed in Africa during that period. – Sapa-AFP