Police Find Two Tigers in Hanoi Woman's Fridge
Date: 06-Sep-07
Country: VIETNAM
The 40-year-old woman confessed to police she hired three
experts to cook tiger bones to make traditional medicines that
she sold for about US$800 per 100 grams. Police arrested the
woman and the three cooks.
The woman stored the tigers in a fridge inside her
apartment and cooked outside the building in an area where
people regularly gathered to eat porridge for breakfast.
Although Vietnam is party to a treaty to protect endangered
species, animals and animal parts are still smuggled from
neighbouring countries and around Vietnam for use as medicine.
"She has been doing this publicly for a long time,"
Tienphong (Vanguard) newspaper quoted a neighbour as saying.
"The smell from the kitchen polluted the neighbourhood."
The two adult Indochinese tigers, weighing 250 kg and
estimated to cost about US$20,000 each, could have been bought
from Myanmar or Laos, newspaper reports quoted officials as
saying.
"The tigers could have been bought in Laos and transported
back to Vietnam by ambulances or hidden in coffins," forest
ranger Vuong Tri Hoa was quoted as saying by Nong Nghiep
Vietnam (Agriculture Vietnam) newspaper.
Police also found four bear paws, ivory and various other
wild animal parts in the woman's apartment on Tuesday, the
reports said.
Last month, eight men were jailed for up to 11- years
for poisoning a tiger in a zoo and selling it for US$15,000 in
southern Tien Giang province.
Vietnam signed the Convention on International Trade in
Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, in 1994
and conservationists said only about 150 tigers survive in the
wild in the Southeast Asian country.