Million-dollar haul of rhino horns in Vietnam
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Hanoi (dpa) - Two men transporting 31 rhinoceros horns worth an estimated one million dollars were arrested by police in Vietnam, a police official said Monday.
Police discovered the horns on Saturday, said Major General Nguyen Xuan Lam, director of Nghe An provincial police department in central Vietnam.
Suspects Doan Duy Dinh and Le Thanh Trung, both 32, were caught with 37 kilograms of horns in three bags at a railway station, police told dpa.
Dinh said that an unidentified man had hired him to transport the consignment from Ho Chi Minh City to Nghe An for 1,850 dollars, police said.
Demand for the horn of the endangered species among Vietnam's wealthy elite has been partly blamed by conservation groups for a spike in rhino killings that reached a record 1,215 in 2014, 10 times the number killed in 2009, according to Wild Aid, which works to end the illegal trade in animal parts.
Folk superstitions in Vietnam esteem rhino horn as a medicine, aphrodisiac and status symbol.
A single gram of rhino horn can command 133 dollars while a kilogram of ivory costs about 2,100 dollars on the black market, according to reports.
Most of the world's rhinos live in southern Africa. Over the weekend, the South African government said that poaching of rhinos had increased by 18 per cent in the first four months of this year, compared to the same period last year.
Authorities are bracing for further arrivals and have recruited fishermen to assist in patrolling the coast of the remote western Indonesian province.
"We are on standby and ready to rescue them when we receive an alert," Budiawan said.
Buddhist-majority Myanmar views its population of roughly 800,000 Rohingya as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants, and they have been targeted in outbreaks of sectarian violence there in recent years, prompting many to flee.
Thousands have braved the dangerous sea crossing from Myanmar to southern Thailand and beyond in the hope of reaching mainly Muslim Malaysia, but many often fall prey to people-traffickers in Thailand.
Chris Lewa from The Arakan Project, a Rohingya rights group, said she believes thousands of migrants are trapped at sea following crackdowns on trafficking in Thailand as well as in Malaysia in recent months.
"Thailand has tried to prevent traffickers from continuing their business... so that has forced them to go somewhere else," she told AFP.
"Brokers have been using ships as a camp.
"They're just trying to disembark before they die," she said of migrants perishing on boats without food, adding she expected many more to appear on Indonesian shores.
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Boatloads of Rohingya have arrived off Aceh in the past, typically after becoming lost or running out of fuel.
But Indonesian officials said the first group which arrived near a beach in north Aceh early Sunday were tricked and told to swim to land.
"One of the migrants who could speak Malay told me that their agent had told them they were in Malaysia, and to swim to shore," Darsa, a disaster management agency official who like many Indonesians goes by one name, told AFP.
Indonesian authorities on Monday revised the number of migrants aboard the first boat which arrived in north Aceh at the weekend to 573, from an initial figure of around 500.
"This number could get bigger as we are still processing the data," north Aceh police chief Achmadi told AFP.
Darsa said there were 83 women and 41 children on board. One of the women was pregnant and some of the children were aged under 10.
"Some of them were not doing too well and needed medical attention," he said.
One Muslim Rohingya aboard that vessel told journalists in north Aceh that the group had boarded the boat in Thailand and were heading to Malaysia before the traffickers abandoned them at sea with little fuel.
Achmadi said many of those brought to shore complained of hunger and illness and were taken to clinics for treatment.
The bulk of those migrants were being kept at a sports centre, but others are staying in the homes of local residents, he added.
The boatload that arrived in east Aceh early Monday was also receiving food and medical care as immigration authorities begin processing their cases.
The UN considers the Rohingya to be one of the world's most persecuted minorities.
