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An orangutan dances on a car during a mock
kick-boxing performance. (AFP) | The owner
of a private Bangkok zoo has been charged with smuggling orangutans into Thailand to be used for mock
Thai boxing bouts to entertain
tourists, police said.
Pin Kiewkacha was charged after a police swoop on the Safari World park and faces
four years in jail for illegally importing orangutans from Indonesia or
Malaysia.
Police found only 69 of the 110 endangered primates kept by
the zoo after it was ordered last week to halt controversial orangutan
kickboxing fights following an outcry .
Pin could also face charges over 41 missing animals that
police believe have been spirited
away from the park despite the zoo's claims that they died
of pneumonia.
Colonel Vichit Nanthawong, of Thailand's forestry police,
said: "He reported himself to police before the arrest warrant was issued
thus we have to release him for the moment."
Thailand says it is intent
on stamping
out the illegal wildlife trade ahead of a Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) conference being
held in Bangkok later this year.
The World Wide Fund for Nature has claimed fewer than 30,000
orangutans remain in the world and the animal could become extinct in as
little as 20 years if the decline continues.
It said 91 percent of the orangutan population in Borneo and
Sumatra islands had disappeared over the past century.
The red-haired apes, close kin to humans, are found only on
Borneo, which is shared by Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, and on the
neighbouring Indonesian island of Sumatra.
The World Wide Fund for Nature blamed commercial logging,
clearance for oil palm plantations and agriculture, hunting and
poaching for the bush meat and
pet trades as well as forest fires for the shrinking population.
(Agencies)
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