DAR ES SALAAM, Dec 18 (Reuters) -
Tanzania has sentenced four Chinese men to 20 years in jail each after
they were convicted of smuggling rhino horns, part of a crackdown in
sub-Saharan Africa on lucrative illegal poaching of protected wildlife.
The
East African country, which relies heavily on revenues from safari
tourism and new President
John Magufuli has pledged to root out poaching
as part of a wider war on corruption.
The
Mbeya Resident Magistrate's Court in southern Tanzania handed the
prison terms to the Chinese nationals on Thursday, according to court
documents seen by Reuters.
Song Leo, 33,
Xiao Shaodan, 29, Chen Jianlin, 34, and Hu Liang, 30, were charged last
month for smuggling 11 rhino horns into Tanzania from neighbouring
Malawi. They denied the charges.
Prosecutors
said the Chinese men entered Tanzania posing as tourists, but upon
inspection were found in illegal possession of rhino horns hidden in
their car.
Mbeya regional police commander
Ahmed Msangi told Reuters that the four defendants were also fined 9
billion Tanzanian shillings ($4.23 million) each - 10 times the value of
the rhino horns they were found with.
Msangi
said the court also ordered the confiscation of a pick-up truck and
electronic devices, such as i-pads, that were used by the Chinese
smugglers.
Rhino horn is in huge demand in
Asia, earning untold millions for traffickers, because it has been used
for centuries in Chinese medicine, ground into powder to treat maladies
including rheumatism, gout and even supposed devil possession.
Tanzania
in October also charged prominent Chinese businesswoman Yang Feng Glan,
66, dubbed the "Ivory Queen", with running a network that smuggled out
tusks from 350 elephants. She is under arrest and facing a separate
trial.
In Kenya in January 2014, a court
convicted a Chinese man of smuggling ivory and ordered him to pay a fine
of 20 million shillings ($233,000) or serve seven years in jail, the
first sentencing since Kenya introduced its new anti-poaching law.
The
Elephant Action League, a U.S.-based conservation group, hailed
Tanzania's prosecution of the Chinese nationals, saying it marked
another high-profile swoop on poachers in Tanzania.
Tanzania's
elephant population shrank from 110,000 in 2009 to around 43,000 in
2014, according to a census released in June, with conservationists
blaming "industrial-scale" poaching. There are also far fewer rhinos and
they are endangered. ($1 = 2,130.0000 Tanzanian shillings) (Reporting
by Fumbuka Ng'wanakilala; Editing by George Obulutsa and Mark Heinrich)
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