Catch a poacher by following the gun and mobile records

The chase was the result of new breakthroughs in Tanzania’s fight against an increasingly rapacious poaching trade, which has felled 60 percent of the country’s elephant population in the past five years.  

Yang Feng Glan, the ‘Ivory Queen’ is accused of running a smuggling empire stretching from the game parks of Tanzania to the clandestine ivory markets of Asia and is held responsible for smuggling 706 pieces of ivory worth US$ 2.51 million in the 14 years since 2000. Prosecutors say Yang organized, managed and financed a criminal racket in ivory equalling 1.9 tonnes. 

Her arrest was the culmination of more than a year’s work and relied in large part on the novel use of old crime fighting methods at Tanzania’s National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU). The serious crimes squad has started to tackle poaching using the lessons it learned hunting al Qaeda in the years after the group bombed two US embassies in East Africa in 1998. 

The new techniques follow work done in neighbouring Kenya, where poaching rates have nosedived. In both countries the police have started concentrating on the poachers’ own technology, guns and phones, and using it against them. By combining that with old-fashioned detective work, they have captured more suspects. 

The history of a suspect’s gun, the phone calls he or she makes, and the money they move, create a trail of evidence. Yang herself had fled Tanzania to Uganda and she was caught when she returned to Tanzania, and the NTSCIU, tracking her, entrapped her. 

Tanzania’ s elephant population has dropped to about 43,000 in 2014 from 109,000 in 2009.By the time of Yang’s arrest, about 60 people set about building networks of informants, and built a strategy. They called it “follow the gun, save the elephant.”