A court in Indonesia has sentenced a man to five years in prison for the killing of a critically endangered Sumatran tiger in September last year in North Sumatra province. “As far as I know, it’s the heaviest sentence ever imposed for crimes involving protected wildlife in Indonesia,” Iding Achmad Haidir, chair of the Sumatran Tiger Forum, told Mongabay Indonesia. Judges at the Mandailing Natal District Court also fined the accused, Aman Faisal Tambunan, 200 million rupiah (almost $12,000). Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae) are the most endangered subspecies of tiger in the world, with an estimated 400-600 individuals remaining across the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Aman stood accused of subjecting a young female tiger to a slow death, court documents showed. According to the documents, on Sept. 9, Aman discovered a female tiger, around 18 months old, ensnared in one of the many traps he had set in a forest around Hutarimbaru SM village in Kotanopan subdistrict. He then attached a second snare, assaulted the animal and recorded photos and videos of the tigress before leaving her in the forest. She was found dead in the forest two days later. A postmortem revealed sepsis and organ damage, as well as myiasis in an open wound on the front leg caused by the wire snare. Aman claimed that the snares he had set were meant to catch wild boars. However, prosecutors proved that Aman had targeted animals with high commercial value. “As long as the demand for body parts…This article was originally published on Mongabay
From Conservation news via this RSS feed
I’d say 5 years aren’t enough, but i don’t know what Indonesian prisons are like.