RI police training 40 wildlife enforcement officers

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - The Indonesian Police Headquarters in cooperation with the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN WEN)opened a 13-day training course for 40 wildlife enforcement officers in Bogor, West Java, on Tuesday.

"Some 60 percent of the partcipants come from the Indonesian Police, while the rest are forestry ministry and customs officers," deputy director for special crimes at the National Police Headquarters, Senior Commissioner Sadar Sebayang. said.

He said the officers would be trained to work in areas or locations where wildlife smuggling often occurs such as international airports, seaports and areas bordering neighboring countries.

"They will be made to understand more about criminal acts as many of them still are unable to identify or detect such acts." he added.

He said wildlife smuggling also often happened in border areas where there was little or no law enforcement.

"The sheer vastness of Indonesia`s territory is the main obstacle in efforts to fight wildlife smuggling," he said.

Some wildlife smuggling cases that were handled by police or other law enforcing agencies in the past had shown that wildlife smuggling often occurred in border regions, he said.

Citing examples, he said several scaly anteaters were some time ago smuggled to Malaysia from Medan and snakes to Hong Kong from Bali.In other cases, turtles were illegally transported to China and Taiwan, he said.