Police arrest suspected leader of wildlife smugglers

BANGKOK — Thai police have arrested a suspected kingpin of wildlife trafficking who allegedly fueled much of Asia’s illegal trade for over a decade, officials said Saturday.

Boonchai Bach, a 40-year-old Thai of Vietnamese descent, was arrested Friday in the northeastern border province of Nakhon Phanom in connection with the smuggling of 14 rhino horns worth more than $1 million from Africa into Thailand last month, in a case that also implicated a Thai official and a Chinese and a Vietnamese courier, police said.

Boonchai allegedly ran a large trafficking network on the Thai-Laos border that spread into Vietnam. According to the anti-trafficking group Freeland Foundation, he and his family played a key role in a criminal syndicate that has smuggled poached items including ivory, rhino horn, pangolins, tigers, lions and other rare and endangered species.

Police said Boonchai denied the charges against him. Under the wildlife law, he could face up to four years in prison and a 40,000 baht ($1,300) fine, but authorities said they’re also considering money-laundering and customs violation charges that carry up to 10 years in prison.

“One of the largest known wildlife traffickers in a really big syndicate has been arrested,” said Matthew Pritchett, Freeland’s director of communications. “In a nutshell, I can’t think of anything in the past five years that has been this significant.”

Thailand is a transit hub for trafficked wildlife mostly destined for China, and was considered to have the largest unregulated ivory market in the world before it introduced the Elephant Ivory Act of 2014 and 2015 to regulate the domestic ivory market and criminalize the sale of African elephant ivory.