Indian customs officers have arrested a plane passenger after discovering two endangered gibbons stuffed inside a checked bag, the latest animals seized from smugglers at Mumbai’s airport.<\/p>\n
One of the tiny apes from Indonesia was dead, while the other, in a video shared by Indian Customs, was seen cradled in the arms of an officer, softly hooting before covering its face with its arm.<\/p>\n
Customs said the passenger, who had travelled from Malaysia via Thailand, was given the rare apes by a wildlife trafficking “syndicate” for delivery in India.<\/p>\n
Officers acting on “specific intelligence” arrested the passenger in Mumbai yesterday.<\/p>\n
“A subsequent search of their checked baggage, a trolley bag, led to the discovery and seizure of two Silvery Gibbon (Hylobates moloch), one live and one found dead, which were concealed in a basket,” the customs department said.<\/p>\n
Wildlife trade monitor TRAFFIC, which battles the smuggling of wild animals and plants, warned in June of a “very troubling” trend in trafficking driven by the exotic pet trade.<\/p>\n
More than 7,000 animals, dead and alive, have been seized along the Thailand-India air route in the last 3.5 years, it said.<\/p>\n
Home in the wild for the small Silvery Gibbon is the rainforests of Java in Indonesia.<\/p>\n
They are threatened by the loss of forests, hunting and the pet trade, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.<\/p>\n
Estimates for the primates left range from about 2,500 to 4,000.<\/p>\n
The seizure follows several recent smuggling busts at the same airport.<\/p>\n
Just a week earlier, customs officials said they had arrested another smuggler carrying snakes, tortoises and a raccoon.<\/p>\n
In June, Mumbai customs intercepted two passengers arriving from Thailand with dozens of venomous vipers and more than 100 other creatures, including lizards, sunbirds and tree-climbing possums, also arriving from Thailand.<\/p>\n
In February, customs officials at Mumbai airport stopped a smuggler with five Siamang Gibbons, an ape native to the forests of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Indian customs officers have arrested a plane passenger after discovering two endangered gibbons stuffed inside a checked bag,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-237994","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237994","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}