Most widespread wildlife crime raid ever sweeps across more than 100 countries

A global coordinated effort led to the seizure of thousands of protected animals, plants, and wildlife products.

By Rachel Fobar
Published 10 Jul 2019, 12:19 BST
Leopard tortoises were some of the nearly 10,000 live turtles and tortoises seized in Operation Thunderball.
Leopard tortoises were some of the nearly 10,000 live turtles and tortoises seized in Operation Thunderball.
Photograph by Vincent Grafhorst, Minden Pictures/Nat Geo Image Collection

Global police and customs officials have concluded the most widespread environmental crime operation ever organised. The raid involved 109 countries and resulted in nearly 2,000 seizures of protected wildlife, including 440 ivory pieces, more than 4,300 birds, and nearly 10,000 live turtles and tortoises, according to Interpol.

The effort, coordinated by Interpol and the World Customs Organisation, identified nearly 600 suspects and spurred arrests around the world. Dubbed Operation Thunderball, it’s the third in a series—Interpol executed Operation Thunderbird in 2017 and Operation Thunderstorm in 2018, both of which targeted the illegal wildlife and timber trade and resulted in thousands of seizures.

More than 4,300 birds were seized, including these parakeets discovered by Ecuador's environmental police.
Photograph by Interpol

The illegal wildlife trade is a multibillion pound criminal enterprise. It’s the primary threat to the survival of numerous species, including African elephants, which are targeted for their ivory; pangolins, which are targeted for use in traditional Chinese medicine, and many species of birds and reptiles, which enter the exotic pet trade. Wildlife crime is linked to corruption, money laundering, and other forms of organised crime. 

Wildlife crime has spiked in recent years, which is why Interpol and the WCO decided to join forces, says Roux Raath, WCO’s environment program manager. “The demand [for wildlife products] is increasing, the world population is increasing,” he says.

Over the month of June, officials seized 23 live primates, 30 big cats, more than a ton of pangolin scales, 74 truckloads of timber, more than 2,600 plants, and nearly 10,000 marine species. By number of countries, this was the largest operation targeting wildlife crime in history. Previous operations in the “Thunder” series involved fewer than 100 countries. 

The operation focused on identifying trafficking routes and crime hotspots ahead of time, with the aim of preventing wildlife crime from occurring. “When we start working, most of the time, it’s too late in terms of conservation,” says Henri Fournel, Interpol’s coordinator of environmental security. “We just want to make it clear to the criminals that…we are just watching them.”

Operation Thunderball is “not a numbers game,” says the WCO’s Raath. If the number of seizures has gone down over the years, it means their efforts are leading to the “dismantling of criminal networks,” he says.

“If we keep the pressure on and if we clamp down on specific routes and specific countries,” Raath says, “that forces criminals to either look at different commodities or either different countries, different routes….It’s changing the patterns.”

This is the key to dealing with wildlife crime, says Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society—it’s about targeting the “criminal networks that are driving this horrendous crime,” not individuals. She says it’s “fantastic” that Interpol and the WCO are aiming to disrupt criminal networks, and to be most effective, the countries have to follow up with prosecutions.

“A lot of times we see seizures, and then nothing happens,” she says. “People have to go to jail, particularly the people running these networks—the spider in the center of the web.”

During an x-ray luggage inspection at the airport, customs officials in Singapore detected these dried seahorses, which were being smuggled from Indonesia to Vietnam.
Photograph by Interpol

Officials hope the scale of this operation and the new collaboration between Interpol and the WCO, two of the largest enforcement organisations in the world, will set a precedent for working together in the future.

“It is not something that we aim at doing only for once and for the sake of having a nice press release,” Fournel says. “This is, for us, the foundation of a new era where customs and police will work hand-in-hand against wildlife and timber traffickers.”

Wildlife Watch is an investigative reporting project between National Geographic Society and National Geographic Partners focusing on wildlife crime and exploitation. Read more Wildlife Watch stories here, and learn more about National Geographic Society’s nonprofit mission at nationalgeographic.org. Send tips, feedback, and story ideas to ngwildlife@natgeo.com.
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