Police in Thailand have detained the suspected head of Asia’s largest and most prolific wildlife smuggling gangs.
Boonchai Bach, 40, stands accused of making a fortune out of trafficking huge quantities of illicit elephant tusks and rhino horns out of Africa to Asia, where they are used in traditional medicines.
The Thai national of Vietnamese origin was held by investigators at his base in Nakorn Panom, Thailand, next to the Mekong River, on suspicion of smuggling 14 rhino horns estimated to be worth around $975,400 from Africa to Thailand last month.
Bach is said to be one of the leading members of a family-run wildlife trafficking network that smuggled large amounts of animal parts from Africa to major dealers in Laos, Vietnam and China, including to the notorious Vixay Keosavang, who is renowned as one of the most ruthless wildlife criminals operating in Southeast Asia.
“This arrest is a significant for many reasons,” Police Colonel Chutrakul Yodmadee told the Freeland Foundation, a Thai charity that campaigns for a world free of wildlife trafficking and human slavery.
“The confiscated items are high in value. And we are able to arrest the whole network involved, starting from the courier, the facilitator, the exporter who plan to export goods through Thai-Laos border. We even got the moneyman (investor) behind the gang. That means we are able to arrest the whole network.”
Bach could be jailed for four years and receive a $1,300 fine if he is found guilty of committing the offences of which he has been accused, but police are considering charging him with further crimes that could result in him receiving a much more severe punishment.
Investigators are also said to be probing allegations that Bach oversaw a smuggling operation that involved huge quantities of poached elephant ivory, rhino horns, pangolins, tigers, lions and other rare and endangered species being sold to dealers for more than a decade.
Separately, the AFP news agency reports that wildlife smugglers on Tuesday drowned hundreds of birds they were trafficking from Malaysia to Indonesia by throwing them into the sea.
The traffickers lobbed around 300 birds into the water as they were pursued by coast guard boats off the southwest peninsular of Malaysia.
Investigators were only able to rescue three of the birds, which were believed to have been a type of lark that are sold as pets in Indonesia.
“The total number was 300 birds – only three have been saved,” Malaysian coast guard official Commander Azman Samsudin commented.
“When the smugglers were chased by us, they threw the birds into the sea.”
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