The Wild Crime Report for Monday 12 May 2025
A questionable pardon, sentencing for ants and tigers, and monkeys in strange places!
Welcome to the Wild Crime Report for this week. Diving faster than a cheetah chasing its lunch into some legal decisions that got people talking, the usual hive of activity that we expect in India and literal monkey business on a plane flying out of Colombia.
Let’s get into some information.
Presidential pardon sparks outrage and confusion in Malawi
There was outrage and confusion in Malawi last week as a convicted wildlife trafficker allegedly had their sentenced commuted. Chinese national, Yunhua Lin, was convicted in 2021 for trafficking multiple wildlife species and got sentenced to 14 years. It was celebrated at the time by conservationists and wildlife enforcement practitioners alike, as a text book case study in enforcement against the sort of high level kingpins in Africa that usually operate outside of the law.
However, social media erupted last week with reports of the more typical “teflon justice” often common with those same high level kingpins. Press reports announced that Lin had been granted a pardon by Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera, meaning that he would have served barely 4 years of the 14 years imprisonment imposed by the court. Yet there were few details about the date of the pardon or circumstances in which it was granted.
However the Malawi Prison Service (MPS) were far more emphatic two days ago when they stated that Lin was still in custody. According to MPS “Each pardon application is thoroughly scrutinised by a designated committee comprising experts from various fields. The process is guided by clear rules and due process.”
With another report stating that Lin was still fighting his sentence and had a court date set for today, 12 May 2025, there will be more to come. Given the stiff sentences meted out in other parts of southern Africa for the same offences, anything less than the majority of the sentence being served and Lin getting deported upon his release, would be a slap in the face to the wildlife protection community.
The Ant Four get sentenced in Kenya
And now to a story that has been widely reported on, the ‘Ant Four’ finally had their sentences handed down in a Kenyan court last week. The two Belgian men Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx and the Vietnamese national Duh Hung Nguyen and Kenyan Dennis Ng'ang'a, all part of separate investigations but heard together, were given 1 year imprisonment or a fine of USD$7,700.
My guess is that $30,800 in cash will be getting assembled rather quickly from the various corners of the world and remitted to a Kenyan court. If it hasn’t already. As I stated in this article a couple of weeks ago, it will be interesting to examine whether this case was a one off or part of an ongoing surge in rare insect trafficking.
Tiger trafficking conviction in India
Over in India, a Tibetan national known as Tashi Sherpa was sentenced last week to five years imprisonment after being on the radar for a decade for tiger poaching and trafficking offences. Sherpa was apprehended in January 2024 near the north Indian city of Siliguri which sits at the foothills of the Himalayas. It comes after a network connected to him that involved up to 30 members had been unraveled following successful convictions in 2022.
Leopard skins and boar horn seized in India
From tigers to leopards, and in the central Indian city of Ujjain, officers from the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence pounced on two wildlife traffickers caught in possession of leopard skins and a boar’s horn. The operation relied on the provision of timely intelligence before the investigators tracked the traffickers to a hotel where they were arrested.
Rare primates seized at a hotel in Mumbai.
Never a dull moment in India, that’s for sure. Over in Mumbai and another hotel was the scene of a wildlife seizure where nine rare monkeys where discovered. Two individuals were arrested, one of them a Malaysian National from where the species are alleged to have been brought.
Amongst the species were four siamang gibbons, three white-faced gibbons and two pig-tailed macaques, however all but one pig-tailed macaque survived the ordeal.
Monkeys smuggled in pants at Colombia Airport
And in another more bizarre case of monkey smuggling, a male and female couple were arrested attempting to fly out of Colombia with six monkeys in their underwears. Yes, you read that correctly.
The couple, whose nationality and destination was not disclosed in media reports, were found ‘concealing’ the sedated monkeys, four tamarins and two white faced apes, while going through security. As is often the case, two of the monkey’s were deceased and given they are reported to be less than 2 months old, it’s surprising the rest of them survived.
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Stay wild.