Documents do not match elephant

Nadika Hapuarachchi, a member of Wildlife Conservation Society says that there is a clear Elephant-smuggling racket going on and the officials were fully aware of it. He says the issue of misplacing the elephant registration document at the Department also seemed to be fishy.

“From the information we have it is not the Elephant Registry which is misplaced. The Minister himself admitted that it is not the registry but something else. According to the information we have the elephant registry has not been updated for some time. When registering and issuing permits for an elephant there is a book in the Ministry which has details on those permits. There are six such books. What was misplaced is one of them. They have replaced the book. This has paved the way to register illegally smuggled elephants,” he said. He says that ninety-eight per cent of Elephants who are with private owners have either been captured them from the wild or the owners have obtained licences illegally.

Also commenting on the issue in Mirigama, he said the case was called before the Attanagalle Magistrate. (Case Number AR/291/14). There, a few environmental groups had tried to intervene in order to expose the baby elephant racket, stating that to illegally hold a baby elephant without proper permission was a crime. However the intervening party’s request was rejected.

Hapuarachchi said it was revealed the documentation provided did not match with the elephant. Later a Buddhist monk had produced different documentation pertaining to the elephant through a lawyer. However, this too did not match the elephant. Thereafter, more time was requested to check the legitimacy of the documents. Yet, the even the Department of Wildlife Conservation presented a report saying the registration did not match the documents the elephant was released.