Cross-Border Poaching KNP - Mozambique

[H. erectus]

'cause all the way down the chain of delivery there is buck
to be made!! Just sad to see how rotten people really can
get both sides of the fence!!!

[Richprins]

Not all make it back over the fence...so not all is lost!

[H. erectus]

RP,... we have an equal amount of sophisticated misfits
this side of the border, far away from that boundary!!!

All out on the take, maybe not white collar crime, call it,
Khaki collared crime just maybe,...

[Richprins]

Ja! Whoooh! Everyone has been feeding from the trough!

Farm owners, vets, tour operators, provincial parks staff...you name it!

[Sprocky]

It is time that the SA Customs and Excise start doing their job. The Lebombo port of entry must be the easiest route in the world to smuggle goods. I have never had my vehicle searched there on entry or exit.

Today I took it one step further. On entering SA I went into the customs area to have my passport and gate pass stamped, I left the other two occupants at the car. Once done 'rubber stamping' I drove off, with my occupants. Gate pass handed over, and only one person with stamped passport, back in sunny SA with no issues. My next trip will be in and out without a stamp in any passport. It IS this easy!!! How many rhino horns could have been internationally translocated in the time it took me to type this post???

[H. erectus]

This madness needs to be stifled, by adopting a
brutal and emotional free understanding in society!!!

I doubt this fits .govs intentions!!

[Richprins]

.gov has an extremely long and cozy history with .moz, politically speaking.

.gov does not believe in asking awkward questions regarding their old friends...at least not getting angry with .moz, which should have happened years ago!

[Toko]

The town that thrives on rhino horn

April 23 2013 at 06:00pm
By Shaun Smillie

Part one: The town that thrives on rhino horn
Part two and three of this series will be published on Thursday.


Kabok, Western Mozambique - You can’t find this town on Google Earth, and it appears on no maps.

From space all it is is a scatter of buildings that straddle the only tar road that cuts through this remote part of western Mozambique.

The place is known as Kabok and for a town that appears to have nothing, it sure is going through an economic boom.

And from a dirt track we could see Kabok’s new-found wealth first- hand. What we were looking at was Kabok’s millionaires’ row, where the untouchables live.

“This is a rhino town,” explains the anti-poaching officer who is acting as our guide.

He wants to remain anonymous.

On the tar road, a red hatchback speeds past, the driver’s head snaps to the side and takes a good look at us. We have been noticed.

“He is a poacher,” says the anti-poaching officer.

Two minutes later, the red car drives past in the opposite direction; he eyeballs us again.

Others along the tar road stare too. The poachers, pointed out by the officer, stand out. Their style of dress says city, their clothes are bright and clean, they sport new jeans, some have neck chains.

No faded paper-thin cotton shirts, like the rest of Kabok wears.

They loiter around spaza shops, they swagger.

But we are here to see millionaires’ row. In front of us, dotted on a slight rise, are Kabok’s mansions – the houses the rhino poachers built for themselves.

In neighbouring South Africa, these mansions would be called matchboxes. Most are flat-roofed, single-storeyed structures. Some look similar to RDP houses. But what separates these homes from the usual reed houses in Kabok is that they are made from brick.

This part of Mozambique is dirt poor and the remnants of the civil war scar the landscape and the psyche of the people. War amputees wander the dirt roads.

The new Kabok has been built on the horns of the hundreds of rhinos slaughtered just kilometres away in Kruger National Park. It is not alone – there are other towns spread along the border that lines Kruger National Park. They are the staging posts for rhino poachers.

“That house there with the pink curtains – he is a poacher,” says the officer. “You see that white house there, that poacher was shot dead, but his family still lives there.”

There was a time when the bordering Corumane Dam supplied the community with its main source of income – fishing. Now, under the silvery full moon, fishermen ferry poachers across the lake, rowing them up the Sabie River and dropping them close to the Kruger fence.

In South Africa Kabok has long had the reputation of being a haven for robbers and hijackers who take refuge across the border.

Rhino economics filters through the town, the anti-poaching officer explains. Everyone gets a piece of the pie, builders are paid to construct those houses. Spaza shops have sprung up, some built with rhino money. The funeral industry, it appears, gets its cut too.

Then there are the guns for hire.

“There are those who come from Maputo to hire people in Kabok to poach,” explains the officer.

And the majority of residents in the Kabok mansions have become middlemen. They now recruit younger men to do their hunting.

We drive along the dirt road, we turn a corner and there is the red hatchback. The driver is standing next to three other men at a spaza shop. Again he stares, but this time smiles and waves at the anti-poaching officer. The officer waves back. They know each other.

There is little the officer can do to catch this untouchable.

We drive on.

On the outskirts of the town we park and watch. The sun has slipped behind the wall of the Corumane Dam, and in the late afternoon light herders drive their cattle along the tar road into town.

A black Landcruiser glides past.

“That man there is wanted in South Africa and now stays in Mozambique,” says the officer.

“He is a poacher.”

We later learn that the man in the Landcruiser is Frank Ubisi.

For two years he was wanted by the SAPS, Captain Oubaas Coetzer, the spokesman for Skukuza police station, tells us later. He was caught in Kruger in 2010 with a hunting rifle, but later escaped from custody.

Last February he was caught at the Lebombo border post trying to smuggle the body of a poacher across the border. He paid a fine of R10 000 for possession of an illegal firearm and was deported to Mozambique. Ubisi’s Landcruiser draws to a stop outside a collection of reed shacks alongside the road.

The door opens and a man, perhaps in his late teens, struggles out.

His T-shirt is stained with mud, his hair coated in dust. He limps slowly to one of the shacks, opens the door and disappears.

I am flabbergasted.

“He is a poacher, he has come back from Kruger,” I say.

The officer shrugs his shoulders and gives a smile.

[Toko]

Rhino poaching: Part 2

April 25 2013 at 11:16am


Shaun Smillie

The man with the big feet would leave his flip-flops at the fence. Barefooted he’d slip across the fence into Kruger National Park, alone, carrying a .375 calibre rifle fitted with a silencer. On his back was a bag filled with bread, water and an assortment of pills he would later crush up and smoke with tobacco.

Some of the pills were for heartburn, and he never really explained why he smoked it. For protection against rangers, a muti string hung from his rucksack. On the Mozambican side of Kruger National Park, the poacher’s big feet were well known. His barefooted tracks in and out of the park had been seen often. Anti-poaching units working the Mozambican side of Kruger had wanted to catch the man to see if he was as big as his feet promised.

But before the poacher with the big feet got near the fence, he had to pass a test. As a young man wanting to earn money as a poacher he headed to the shebeens of Mugude. There he met the middlemen who looked for recruits willing to chance the section rangers, dogs and helicopters.

But could he shoot? In the bush he was handed a rifle and told to shoot at a Coke bottle. He hit the bottle, so was asked to demonstrate his tracking skills. Children learn to track from an early age in this part of Mozambique. As herders they know their cattle not by name but from each unique cloven imprint. Bigfoot knew how to track.

In the area where Bigfoot operated, Kruger’s rusting fence is sometimes nothing more than four strands. After slipping off his flip-flops – barefoot is quieter – Bigfoot would make his way to a prearranged meeting site to the other two members of his poaching crew.

They had crossed into the park from other points along the fence. Their foray could be at night, or sometimes even in the middle of the day. Once together, their search for rhino spoor began. They had to be careful, not only of the rangers, but of other poachers. If Bigfoot had bumped into other poachers, he said he would have killed them, and taken their horn.

But he claims he never did meet any poachers in the park.

When he moved at night, Bigfoot picked out stars in the expanse of the Milky Way and used them to find direction. But even for someone with Bigfoot’s bush skills, finding a rhino was pot luck. He said he only shot one rhino. The kill was at close range in thick bush, he was less than 30m away. A hatchet was used to hack the horn off and they raced for the border.

Bigfoot made 10 sorties into Kruger. His luck ran out on the 11th.

A rival syndicate ratted him out. Night ambushes and roadblocks were set up.

The following morning the tired officers were drinking tea during a break when one of them noticed Bigfoot and a friend walking towards them.

Bigfoot gave up easily.

The anti-poaching unit discovered he was as tall as his feet had suggested – nearly 2m.

Then Bigfoot did something unexpected – he snitched.

He told his captors where the pick-up car would be netting the anti-poaching unit of two accomplices and a Hilux bakkie with an anti-poaching sticker on the vehicle. And Bigfoot wasn’t finished talking.

He told how he would slip across the border, how he was recruited, how he used those stars.

Bigfoot was handed over and arrested by Mozambican police.

He has been sent to Maputo to stand trial for possession of an illegal firearm.

If the charges stick, his large feet may have left their last spoor on those tracks leading to Kruger.

l This story has been pieced together from what Bigfoot’s captors heard. However, some officers are cautious of what he said – his loose tongue has made some suspicious.

[Toko]

Rhino poaching: Part 3

April 25 2013 at 11:20am


Shaun Smillie

They were prints the trackers didn’t want to see. Etched in the sand were large rosette-shaped tracks, the spoor of the most valuable contraband this side of the border.

Three rhinos had crossed the border from Kruger National Park into Mozambique, slipping through a section that is unfenced, and they now faced danger.

Soon they would be noticed, for in this part of Mozambique there are eyes everywhere. There is money to be made passing information on to a man with a gun and a yearning for rhino horn.

Rhinos often cross from Kruger into Mozambique – there is more water here in the dry season.

But few return.

Their bones, picked clean by predators, lie white in the veld.

Along the border that faces Kruger National Park are an unknown tally of rhinos shot over the past few years. Their deaths go uncounted, they don’t appear on the roll of rhino-poaching fatalities issued monthly by the Department of Environmental Affairs. But the three rhinos now in Mozambique had a chance of making it out alive.

They had wandered into a private reserve protected by anti-poaching patrols. The trackers quickly organised an OP – military slang for “observation post”.

The rhinos were located and a team of three men followed from a distance. They were armed with hunting rifles, enough deterrent for any poacher.

The day passed and the OP continued to follow the three animals as they moved through the bush.

But nightfall was coming and with it a dilemma.

Unable to follow in the darkness, they would have to stand down, and find them in the morning.

In the last light of the day the rhinos came to a waterhole.

The men watched anxiously as the rhinos drank. Waterholes are where poachers look for spoor as rhinos have to drink every day.

As the rhinos finished drinking, the leader of the OP intentionally disturbed them.

“I wanted them to move away, so no one would pick up their track in the night,” says the officer, who didn’t want to be identified.

He watched as the rhinos trotted off into thicker bush.

The moonless night would have to keep the rhinos safe until morning.

The first rhino poaching incident happened in this reserve five years ago. A vet was brought in to save the animal and it survived.

A year later the same animal was dead, killed in a spray of AK-47 automatic rifle fire.

In those early days of poaching, AK-47s were the preferred weapon. They were easy to find and dropped rhinos by sheer number of bullets.

In other places along the border, carcasses were found where the muzzle blast from an AK-47 had scorched the skin of the rhino.

The poachers are believed to have sneaked up on a sleeping rhino and fired at point-blank range.

Since that first kill, at least 20 rhinos have been killed in the reserve.

Their bodies lie where they fell; skulls still carry the strike marks of axes that removed horns years ago. Dried pieces of rhino hide, even too tough for hyenas, lie scattered among the bones.

Poaching evolved, and the hunting rifle became the primary weapon. A single shot was harder to detect.

At first light, the anti-poaching unit were back at the waterhole. The rhinos had moved.

They quickly picked up the rosette-shaped spoor and soon realised they had a problem. The spoor led to the boundary fence, which the rhinos followed for a while. “That is a red flag to anyone in the area that there are rhinos here,” says the officer.

The unit had to make up time – they estimated that the rhinos had an hour’s start. They chased the spoor.

As the sun climbed, so would the chances that the poachers would be tipped off about the rhinos.

For the moment it seemed word hadn’t got out.

There were no signs of human prints shadowing the rhinos.

The team closed in, they found rhino dung still warm to the touch. They were nearly there.

Then they stopped.

The rhinos had crossed into a neighbouring property – they could go no further.

One of the men got into the vehicle and rushed to alert the neighbouring property.

It would be a futile exercise.

For when he returned to the spot where the rhinos had crossed, he was told it was too late. They had heard three shots soon after he had left.

The poachers had beaten them. “It is very, very frustrating,” says the officer.

But there is an inkling of hope – the carcasses have not been reported found.

Vultures have not been spotted wheeling over a possible kill sight. They might not have joined Kruger’s legions of disappeared. Just maybe they made it back.