Yong Feng Glan, the 66-year-old Chinese woman suspect, was accused of being behind the trafficking of huge quantities of ivory from Tanzania and other East African countries to global and local black markets. Glan was identified by Tanzania’s National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) over a year ago and the unit followed her role in the smuggling network, investigators say.
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“It’s the news that we all have been waiting for, for years”, Andrea Crosta, co-founder of the Elephant Action League, said in a statement. Between 2009 and 2014, the elephant population in Tanzania reportedly dropped from 109,051 to 43,330, CNN reports. “A slaughter of industrial proportion such as this cannot have happened without the involvement of high-profile, corrupt individuals and government officials at the two ports of Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, and elsewhere in civil society”, it said. Through the years, Yang became a successful and well-connected businesswoman, founding an investment firm, a popular restaurant – which allegedly smuggled ivory through food shipments – and serving as a business liaison between China and Tanzania. “Tanzania has been the ground zero of elephant poaching in East Africa for the past several years….”
According to Reuters, a court rejected Glan’s plea for bail early Monday because it did not have the jurisdiction of a high court to grant the request.
She first went to Africa during the 1970s, according to police investigators. “She helped buy the poachers guns and ammunition”. As the leader of one of Africa’s biggest ivory smuggling rings, the chargers against her are hopefully the demise of a significant piece of poaching in Tanzania.
She’s facing a maximum sentence of 20 to 30 years in prison, Costa told the Guardian.
Tanzania had one of the largest elephant populations in Africa. “She played a tremendous role in the killing of animals”, said one senior Tanzanian official who spoke on condition of remaining anonymous because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the case in public.
She was at faced on Wednesday in addition to two different Tanzanian guys, Manase Philemon and Silvanus Matembo, who might were usually purportedly coupled with global poachers, merchants and purchasers, in accordance with the describe. “The positive thing is that her arrest may lead to more arrests”.
The Chinese foreign ministry, in the wake of Yang’s arrest, said that China remains committed to stopping illegal ivory trade. “If this is true, then Tanzania is to be congratulated”, she said. “The elephant species is in the hands of the Chinese President”, Crosta said.
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In September, President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Barack Obama made a historical move, promising to to ban ivory imports and exports of ivory. We must put an end to the time of the untouchables if we want to save the elephant.
