Over 100kg of suspected rhino horn seized in Hanoi

Hanoi (VNA) – Over 100kg of suspected rhino horn was discovered in the luggage travelling from Africa to Hanoi on March 14, according to Hanoi Customs.

During their duty performance, customs and anti-smuggling officials at Noi Bai International Airport suspected two briefcases on flight KQ 870 landed the airport from Narobi, the East African country of Kenya, which bore neither recipients nor weight information.

Checking the luggage, the joint forces found that the goods inside the two briefcases weighed 51.1 kg and 60.84 kg, and suspected them rhino horn.

They sent samples of the goods for further tests.

Statistics show that there are only 25,000 wild rhinos in the world at present, dropping by 95 percent over the last 40 years.

South Africa is home to about 20,000 rhinos or 80 percent of the global total. Up to 1,175 rhinos were poached there in 2015, down slightly from the record of 1,215 in 2014. However, many experts believe that the real number of poached rhinos is much higher.

Poaching is attributable to the rising demand for rhino horn in some Asian countries, including Vietnam, since many people in these nations believe that rhino horns can cure illnesses, which is refuted by science.

Conservationists warned that rhinos will become extinct within the next 10 years if poaching is not stopped.

The last Java rhino in Vietnam was killed at Cat Tien National Park in 2010.-VNA