Jakarta Globe 18 Jun 13;
Police from the Sumatra Tiger Patrol in the Kerinci Seblat National Park have found 16 tiger traps spread by hunters across the national park area so far this month, the biggest hauls since the launch of the patrol program.
“The initial phase of field patrol includes a special trap-elimination program which is done annually. This June, it has found and disabled at least 16 tiger traps,” Risdianto, field manager of the field patrol team, known as PHS TNKS, said in Jambi on Monday, as quoted by Antaranews.com.
Sumatra’s forests are home to at least 600 tigers, according a study by conservation groups published in 2012.
Risdianto said the 16 tiger traps were found in two separate areas by two different units. Thirteen traps were found in the Kerinci territory, while another three were found by the patrol unit in Bengkulu.
“In the Kerinci area, the officers found traps spread in 13 different points within the TNKS [Kerinci Seblat National Park], around the Muara Imat Village in the Batang Merangin subdistrict,” he said.
Nine of the 13 traps were found within the premises of the national park, while four were located within farming areas that belonged to local farmers.
The finding of these traps is said to be the biggest since the special patrol police program kicked off, raising suspicion of the possible involvement of outside parties who had provided the funds for hunters to make the traps.
According to Risdianto, before the program started, patrol officers had never found more than 10 traps.
“We suspect that this finding is linked to the involvement of outside parties, such as buyers, and that these individuals had provided the capital for hunters to install the traps, which are relatively expensive,” Risdianto said, adding that one unit of lasso would cost hunters at least Rp 300,000 ($30).
The hunters would have to come up with about Rp 5 million to afford all 16 traps found in the Kerinci area, an amount large enough to indicate that the traps could not have been laid by farmers without extra support from a third party.
“Therefore we have to continue investigating the person behind these traps. We have suspected at least two names, as reported by an intelligence officer we had sent to the field,” Rusdianto said.
The Sumatran tiger is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
