Shortly before 11 a.m. on the last Saturday in May, a heavily laden white Mitsubishi truck pulled into the Fuji Motors East Africa car dealership in an industrial neighborhood on the northern edge of Mombasa. The truck’s cargo was not “household equipment” as declared, but 228 elephant tusks and 74 ivory pieces weighing a total of 2,152 kilograms.
When Kenyan police officers raided the car lot five days later, they refused a bribe of 5 million Kenyan shillings ($55,000), seized the ivory and arrested two men. The bust was one of the biggest in the country’s history but the suspected mastermind, Feisal Mohamed Ali, aged 46, had escaped. Ali was “alleged to be the ringleader of an ivory smuggling ring in Kenya” according to Interpol, and in November the international police organisation listed him among the world’s nine “most wanted environmental criminals.”
A month later Ali was arrested in neighboring Tanzania, extradited to Kenya and charged with illegally dealing in wildlife trophies. It is rare for an alleged ivory kingpin to be caught, and activists hope Ali’s trial will shine a light on the shadowy supply chain that funnels ivory from Africa to Asian markets.
“People who get apprehended are mainly the foot soldiers, the poachers or foreign middlemen,” said Mary Rice, executive director of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency, which recently exposed the scale of ivory smuggling out of Tanzania.
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