Delhi: Giving out a strong message to wildlife offenders, the Additional Sessions Judge, KS Mohi, of the Tis Hazari court, today, rejected the appeal of wildlife trader Anand Tashi. Tashi, serving the fourth year of his five-year term, had appealed for ‘setting aside of his conviction’, on a plea that he had been falsely implicated.
Tashi, a Tibetan from Nepal, was arrested by the Delhi Police in Majnu-ka-tila, north Delhi, on 6 April 2005, along with two accomplices. The tip-off was given by the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI). A huge cache of 45 leopard skins and 14 otter skins, bound for Nepal, was recovered from the trio.
Stamps of quality control in the seized items had provided cogent evidence to a highly organised underground market of illegal wildlife articles. Following the revelation, the Supreme Court transferred the case from Delhi Wildlife Department to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), as requested by WTI.
Saurabh Sharma, WTI lawyer who assisted the CBI prosecutor Rajen Dahiya in the case, said, “Tashi was convicted in November 2007 to five years imprisonment under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. He was in jail since the time of his arrest in 2005. With the rejection of the appeal, he will be released only after completion of his sentence.”
Co-incidentally, the date of arrest of the three traders had also marked the launch of the Tibetan Conservation Awareness Campaign (TCAC) by His Holiness, the Dalai Lama in New Delhi. The campaign, a joint venture of WTI and Care for the Wild International (CWI), aims at spreading conservation awareness among Tibetans.
During their arrest, the trio including another Tibetan resident of Majnu-ka-tila had confessed that they were ‘carriers’ of the stock for a notorious wildlife trader, Tashi Tsering alias Tsewang. The latter was arrested in Nepal on December 11, 2005.
