By Apolinari Tairo
Published February 8, 2018
A famous US American who had spent decades tracking the movement of animal products, mostly from Africa to markets in Asia, has been killed in Kenya.
The killing of 75-year-old Esmond Bradley-Martin brings to three the number of foreign anti-poaching campaigners killed in East Africa in recent years.
Kenyan police said the US anti-poaching investigation crusader was found dead in his Nairobi home on February 4, 2018 with a stab wound in his neck.
Kenyan police said the former UN special envoy for rhino conservation and anti-poaching investigation crusader was found dead in his home in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, with a stab wound in his neck.
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Describing Bradley-Martin’s death as “a very big loss for conservation,” Paula Kahumbu, Chief Executive Officer of Wildlife Direct that seeks to protect elephants in Kenya, as says anti-poaching czar was about to publish a report exposing how the ivory trade had shifted from China to neighboring countries.
The late Bradley-Martin’s research was instrumental in China’s decision to ban its legal rhino horn trade in 1993 and end legal ivory sales in January 2018.
An expert on the prices of ivory and rhino horn, Bradley-Martin’s led undercover investigations into markets in China and Southeast Asia where ivory and rhino horn markets are dominating.
His death, that appears to be an assassination, is seen as a sequence and part of serial killing of foreign wildlife conservation experts in East Africa.
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Tanzania, that neigbours Kenya to the south and shares wildlife resources through cross-border migrations, is the other elephant-range state in Africa where two foreign conservation and anti-poaching campaigners have also been killed.
Roger Gower, 37, was killed when the helicopter he was piloting during an operation was gunned down in Maswa Game Reserve near Tanzania’s famous Serengeti National Park in January 2016.
Gower, a British national, was working with Friedkin Conservation Fund, a charity which was carrying out an anti-poaching mission jointly with Tanzanian authorities.
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Wayne Lotter, a prominent South African-born wildlife conservationist working in Tanzania, was murdered in Tanzania’s commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, while on his way from Julius Nyerere International Airport to his hotel in August 2017.
Before his untimely death, 51-year-old Wayne Lotter had received numerous death threats while battling international ivory-trafficking networks in Tanzania where more than 66 000 elephants have been killed during the past 10 years.
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Tanzania and Kenya are both elephant and rhino-range states, sharing conservation resources as well as tourism and travel itineraries, mostly for American and European tourists.
An eTurboNews article.