![]() When the rangers reached the camp, three of the poachers were out hunting the fourth escaped on foot, and his horse was killed in the crossfire. In the three months that the poachers were in the park, they killed six hundred and fifty elephants.Īfter leaving Cameroon, the men split into smaller groups, and four of them apparently detoured north, toward Zakouma National Park, in neighboring Chad, where, just outside the park, they slaughtered nine more elephants before rangers spotted their camp from the air. He ordered an additional three hundred troops into Bouba-Njida, but they, too, failed to drive out the poachers. A copy of the newspaper found its way to Cameroon’s President, Paul Biya, who was staying at a hotel overlooking Lake Geneva. They didn’t fear anything from anybody.”Īs the killings continued, Sissler-Bienvenu went to the press, and soon Le Monde ran a story featuring photographs of elephants with their trunks missing and their faces cut off. The manager of a lodge in Bouba-Njida Park, who encountered a group of the poachers on horseback, recalled, “When you looked at them, they stared straight back at you. They cut pieces from the elephants’ ears to use as gris-gris. “Very well armed, very strategic, and they implemented ambushes in military style.” Some of the men were believed to be members of Rizeigat, a nomadic Arab group with ties to the janjaweed and to the Darfuri genocide. “They were very well organized,” Sissler-Bienvenu recalled. A handful of people on each side were killed or wounded in skirmishes, but the poachers, who were by then better acquainted with the park’s geography, continued about their business. Cameroon’s government sent a contingent of Army troops to drive the poachers out. Céline Sissler-Bienvenu, a regional director for the U.S.-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, heard about the slaughter, travelled to the park, and notified the authorities in Yaoundé, the capital. This time, they were shooting elephants in far greater numbers, and in some cases sawing off the tusks while the animals were still alive. The poachers had been in the park before, in 2010, when they killed about a dozen elephants and two park guards. The caravan included a pack train of camels loaded with AK-47s, bags of ammunition, heavy machine guns, and two mortars. ![]() They rode seven hundred miles along the northern border, and entered Bouba-Njida National Park, in Cameroon. In November, 2011, a caravan of poachers-as many as a hundred, by some counts-crossed into the Central African Republic on horseback from Sudan.
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