Ivory worth $550k seized in Zurich
Elephant ivory was seized by Swiss customs officials.
A Swiss Federal Customs Administration photo released yesterday shows elephant tusks seized at Zurich’s airport last month.
“There is apparently an effort to open a new ivory trade route via Zurich at the moment”, said Heinz Widmer, the customs chief at the airport.
Found during a July 6 security check, the contraband was packed into eight suitcases and was headed for China, according to CNN.
The elephant tusks had been sawed into items to suit into the bags, which was being transported from Dar es Salaam to Beijing by way of Zurich.
Demand from China’s rising middle class has been fuelling illegal trade in ivory.
After finding the ivory, the three men were temporarily detained and questioned.
“This is by far the largest ivory find in Swiss history”, Zurich-based customs official Miroslaw Ritschard told NBC News.
The ivory haul, while large, is below the 500-kilogram (1,100-pound) threshold considered to be a large-scale seizure that indicates the likely involvement of organized crime, said TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring organization.
He said Tuesday that lion claws and fangs also were discovered during what started out as a “routine screening” at Zurich Airport on July 6.
The group, which said that it doesn’t speculate on the black-market value of ivory as a matter of policy, said the frequency of large-scale seizures has increased greatly since 2000, with 18 such hauls reported in 2013.
An estimated 30 000 elephants are killed for their ivory each year, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.