SINGAPORE: A Singapore court sentenced a South African national to two years in prison on Friday for smuggling rhino horns, the heaviest sentence ever handed down in the city-state for trafficking wildlife parts.
The man named in court documents as Gumede Sthembiso Joel was detained at Singapore’s Changi airport in 2022 after authorities found twenty rhino horn pieces weighing 34.7kg in his bags.
Sniffer dogs detected the banned horn pieces in his baggage while he was travelling from South Africa to Laos through Singapore, according to western media.
The pieces were worth about Sg $1.2 million (895,000 US dollars) — the city-state’s largest seizure of rhino horn.
The 33-year-old man was sentenced after pleading guilty to two charges of transiting with rhino horns without a valid permit.
Singapore’s National Parks Board said in a statement on Friday that this is the heaviest sentence meted out in the country to date for a case involving the smuggling of wildlife parts.
NParks said that after undergoing forensic analysis, eighteen horn pieces were determined to be from fifteen different white rhinos, while another 2 pieces were from a single black rhino.
In determining the appropriate sentence, district court judge Eddy Tham said he had to consider the effect of the 2 rhino species involved.
He said that the harm caused is clearly greater.
Rhinos are protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and global trade in their horns is prohibited.
South Africa a poaching hotspot
Home to about 80% of the world’s rhinoceroses, South Africa is a poaching hotspot, driven by demand from Asia.
