Congo elephant ‘butcher’ jailed for 30 years

A POACHER who is believed to be responsible for the deaths of more than 500 elephants will spend the next 30 years in forced labour after he was convicted of ivory trafficking and attempting to kill park rangers in the Republic of Congo.

Mobanza Mobembo Gérard has been nicknamed “the butcher of Nouabalendoki”, which is a swathe of rainforest that stretches across the Congo Republic’s borders into the Central African Republic and Cameroon. It is believed that Gérard, 35, first started hunting expeditions in 2008 and soon led a team around 25 poachers through the bush to kill hundreds of rare forest elephants with military-grade weapons.

The poaching chief, who is originally from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, was convicted last week by a court in the Congo Republic’s Sangha region, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WSC), an NGO.

The Daily Telegraph understands that Mr Gérard has been surrounded or imprisoned several times by rangers over the last three years but has always managed to either shoot his way out or escape prison. His trial and sentencing marked the first criminal conviction of a wildlife trafficker in the Congo Republic. Previously, environmental crimes were tried in civil courts and incurred a maximum sentence of five years.

Mr Gérard will also be required to pay damages of $68,000 (£51,710) to injured rangers.

“This detention is a major first in the battle against poaching and illegal smuggling of wildlife products,” said Richard Malonga, the head of WCS Congo which works in the Nouabalendoki park. “This creates opportunities to criminalise acts of poaching, and punish poachers even more severely.”

Nouabale-ndoki National Park was created in 1993 and was named as a UNESCO world heritage site in 2012. It is a rare sanctuary in central Africa for endangered forest elephants, gorillas and chimpanzees.

There are now only an estimated 350,000 elephants left in Africa and approximately 10,000 to 15,000 of them are killed every year for their ivory tusks. Most of the ivory is shipped to East Asia where a booming middle class use it in jewellery, ornaments and in traditional Chinese medicine.

Rangers in Kenya, another major wildlife sanctuary, told The Telegraph that the pandemic has wrought havoc on many rural communities who often depend on tourism revenue to put food on the table.

With the tourism revenue almost completely gone, the rangers said that many people were turning to bushmeat hunting or commercial poaching to feed their families.