“The Queen of Ivory”, a Chinese national, arrested by a
specialized Task Force in Tanzania. To date, she is the most important
ivory trafficker ever arrested in the country.
Picture: Mrs. Yang Feng Glan (Credit: Elephant Action League)
Dar-es-Salaam, 8 October 2015 – A specialized
wildlife trafficking unit under Tanzania’s National and Transnational
Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) arrested a number of
high-level Chinese ivory traffickers led by a woman who is now thought
to be the most notorious ivory trafficker brought to task so far
in the war against elephant poaching. She is believed to be behind the
trafficking of a huge quantity of ivory over the last several years.
The woman, now dubbed the “Queen of Ivory”, is a Chinese
national named Yang Feng Glan, 66, and has been followed by the Task
Force for over a year. She recently disappeared from Tanzania,
moving to Uganda, but returned one week ago, when the Task Force swiftly
moved and arrested her. After confessing to many of her crimes she has
been taken to the high court of Dar es Salaam facing a maximum sentence
of 20-30 years imprisonment.
Mrs. Yang Feng Glan is originally from Beijing and is a wealthy
woman, owning several properties and many cars. According to the
first information collected by the Task Force, she first came to
Tanzania in the 1980’s working as an interpreter and she has been
trafficking ivory since at least 2006, working with the most
high-ranking poachers in the country and in the region. She is connected
to various companies abroad, all Chinese-owned, and circulates in the
upper echelons of Chinese citizens living and working in Tanzania.
Tanzania has been the ground zero of elephant poaching in East Africa
for the past several years, having lost 85,000 elephants between 2009
and 2014, according to a recent elephant census in the country. A
slaughter of industrial proportion such as this cannot have happened
without the involvement of high profile, corrupt individuals and
government officials at the two ports of Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar, and
elsewhere in civil society.
“It’s the news that we all have been waiting for, for years”,
commented Mr. Andrea Crosta, co-founder of the Elephant Action League
and WildLeaks. “Finally, a high profile Chinese trafficker is in jail.
Hopefully she can lead us to other major traffickers and corrupt
government officials. We must put an end to the time of the untouchables
if we want to save the elephant”.
“Everyone she has been dealing with will now become a target for law enforcement,” concludes Crosta.
Source: elephantleague