In one of the private homes in the Zhetysu district, police detained a 58-year-old citizen of the People's Republic of China, from whom they seized 50 boxes of saiga horns.
According to Polisia.kz, the man said that he had bought the horns in the Almaty region and planned to send them to his homeland for medicinal purposes.
“A criminal case has been opened on the fact of illegal extraction and destruction of saigas, as well as the acquisition, storage, sale, import, export, forwarding, and transportation of illegally obtained saigas or their derivatives, including horns. The sales channel for the saiga horns is being established,” informed the head of the criminal police department of the Almaty City Police Department, police colonel Talant Isayev.
According to the press service of the Committee of Forestry and Wildlife, the next day in the Turkestan region, inspectors from the State Hunting Inspectorate “Republican State Enterprise ‘Production Association ‘Okhotzooprom’” detained four residents of the Zhambyl and Almaty regions.
It is noted that among the poachers was a current police officer working as a district inspector in the city of Zhanatas.
During an inspection of a Toyota Land Cruiser SUV, which had no registration plates, the inspectors discovered 16 saiga carcasses, separately 13 saiga heads with horns, 2 smoothbore weapons (one with traces of an obliterated serial number), 59 cartridges and 4 searchlights.
The materials were handed over to law enforcement agencies for further investigation.
It will be recalled that in April, it was reported that in the first 4 months of this year, law enforcement seized 15,200 metres of fishing nets, 9 tonnes of fish and fish products, about 3,500 saiga horns, 135 units of hunting weapons and 81 cubic metres of illegally harvested timber.
In March, the border service department of the National Security Committee for the Zhetysu region detained three citizens of Kazakhstan in the border zone attempting to export 1,382 saiga horns. The damage to the state was then estimated at more than 3.5 billion tenge. Incidentally, according to our data, one horn on the black market costs about $2,000.
In May, in Almaty, four men tried to sell more than 1,200 saiga horns, packed in eight sacks, but were detained by police.
In June, it became known that in the Zhetysu region, authorities detained a local resident who was storing 464 saiga horns in his attic, the total value of which is estimated at 1.2 billion tenge.
Later, at the “MCPS-Khorgos” customs post in the Zhetysu region, during border control, a citizen of Kazakhstan was found with 112 saiga horns.
In September, on a farm in the Irgiz district of the Aktobe region, police discovered 5 sacks with 320 saiga horns, as well as unregistered hunting rifles.
At the beginning of October, a resident of the Kostanay region was sentenced to 8 years in prison for the illegal storage and transportation of saiga horns. In the car he had rented, illegally obtained 823 saiga horns were found, estimated to be worth more than 2 billion tenge.
Thus, according to our calculations, since the beginning of the year, law enforcement agencies have seized nearly 6,500 saiga horns.