Eight people, including two Cambodian Forestry Administration officials, have been charged by U.S. federal prosecutors for their alleged involvement in an international monkey smuggling ring.

One of the officials charged, Kry Masphal, was arrested at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, en route to Panama, where he was to have represented Cambodia at an international conference on the global wildlife trade.

In a Nov. 16 press statement, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that as many as 3,000 wild long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) have been laundered through Vanny Bio Research’s facilities in Cambodia since at least December 2017. Cambodian Forestry Administration officials allegedly received cash payments for each animal captured in the wild and then created fake papers from CITES, the global convention on the wildlife trade, that mislabeled the long-tailed macaques as captive-bred monkeys.

The two officials, Masphal and Keo Omaliss, have both worked as CITES representatives for Cambodia, with Omaliss also serving as director-general of the Forestry Administration, while Masphal works beneath him as deputy director of the Forestry Administration’s Department of Wildlife and Biodiversity.

Both were named in a 27-page indictment from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida that was unsealed after Masphal’s Nov. 16 arrest as he was headed to the CITES conference in Panama.

Also charged were James Man Sang Lau, founder and owner of both Hong Kong-headquartered Vanny Resources Holdings and Vanny Bio Research’s Cambodian operation; Vanny Resources Holdings general manager Dickson Lau, deputy manager Sunny Chan, and finance officer Sarah Yeung; Vanny Bio Research general manager Hing Ip Chung; and Raphael Cheung Man, public relations and export manager at Vanny Bio Research.

Each of the eight defendants were charged with one count of conspiracy and seven counts of smuggling in violation of the U.S. Lacey Act and the Endangered Species Act. If found guilty in the U.S., the defendants could serve up to five years for the conspiracy charge, and an additional 20 years for each of the seven smuggling charges.

“Wild populations of long-tailed macaques, as well as the health and well-being of the American public, are put at risk when these animals are removed from their natural habitat and illegally sold in the United States and elsewhere,” Edward Grace, assistant director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Office of Law Enforcement, said in a statement. “The Service spearheaded this complex, multi-year investigation that exposes the large-scale illegal laundering of wild long-tailed macaques for use in biomedical and pharmaceutical research. We led multiple U.S. federal agencies to provide a one-government approach to end the wholesale poaching of long tailed macaques from the wild and shut down this criminal organization.”

Officials at Cambodia’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries initially declined to answer questions about Omaliss’s indictment and Masphal’s arrest. On the evening of Nov. 17 they issued a statement saying they were “surprised and saddened” to learn of Masphal’s detention in the U.S., adding that the ministry “adheres to the principles and laws set out in the CITES convention.”

The statement also denied that long-tailed macaques, also known as crab-eating macaques, exported to the U.S. from Cambodia had been caught from the wild.

“Since 2005, the monkeys have been farmed in Cambodia and are exported for pharmaceutical research for new medicines and vaccines as well as cosmetic products. They are not caught from the wilderness and smuggled out, but farmed in decent manners with respect to good hygiene and health standards so as to preserve the gene pool,” the ministry said, adding that the government would make “our utmost efforts to seek justice for our officials.”

Main Source: Mongabay