New Delhi, 10 January 2006

In the early hours of 10 January, a police team raided a house in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh, and seized 14 fresh leopard skins and an otter skin. They acted on information provided by the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) in collaboration with the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department. The raid was led by Superintendent of Police, Mr Vir Bahadur Singh.

Investigations are now on to trace the owner of the house, Ameen Ahmed, and his son Imran. This is not Ahmed’s first brush with the law. He was earlier arrested with his brother Wakil and Tsering Atup Tamang (another repeat offender) on 5 January 2003 in Lucknow in possession of 12 leopard skins. Ahmed is also related to the prime accused in the huge seizure in January 2000 in nearby Khaga, of 4 tiger, 74 leopard and 221 otter skins, along with tiger and leopard bones and thousands of claws.

In a second case on 10 January, a police team led by Inspector Bharadwaj of Omti Police Station, Jabalpur, in Madhya Pradesh, seized a fresh tiger skin, two leopard skins and a hyena skin. Three persons from Dindori who had travelled to Jabalpur to sell the skins were arrested. A WPSI representative who viewed the skins said the tiger skin was of a large, adult tiger, about 10 feet in length.

In February 2005, it was revealed that at least one tiger reserve in India had been emptied of tigers by poachers. In August 2005, EIA and WPSI documented the shocking scale of the trade in tiger and leopard skins in Tibet. But despite these dire warnings and much rhetoric, the government still has not acted to curb organized wildlife crime. The Prime Minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, who has taken a personal interest in the tiger's plight, agreed to the establishment of a multi-agency Wildlife Enforcement Bureau at a National Board for Wildlife meeting in March 2005. A few months later the Prime Minister stated that the Bureau would be discussed by the Cabinet in October 2005.

Tragically the Bureau has still not been established and as amply demonstrated above, the killings continue unabated.