A court in Kenya on Tuesday charged two men with transporting wildlife illegally after one of \u200bthem, a Chinese national, was arrested at Nairobi’s \u200cJomo Kenyatta International Airport with more than 2,000 live ants last week.<\/p>\n
Zhang Kequn, 27, was detained last Tuesday while attempting to \u200bleave the country,\u00a0court documents showed. Kenyan immigration officials \u200bhad flagged his passport with a “stop order” after he \u2060evaded arrest in the country last year.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors arraigned \u200ba second person, Charles Mwangi, on Monday, accusing him of\u00a0supplying \u200blive\u00a0ants to foreign traffickers. Authorities linked Mwangi to a shipment of ants seized in Bangkok on March 10, which originated from \u200bthe Kenyan port city of Mombasa.<\/p>\n
Zhang and Mwangi pleaded \u200bnot guilty to the charges before Senior Principal Magistrate Irene Gichobi, \u200cincluding \u2060dealing with wildlife species without a permit. The court ordered both men to be remanded in custody, pending further directions in the case on March 27.<\/p>\n
Ant enthusiasts pay \u200blarge sums to \u200bmaintain colonies \u2060in large transparent vessels known as formicariums, which offer a literal window into the \u200bspecies’ complex social structures and behaviours.<\/p>\n
Four men \u200bwere fined $7,700 \u2060each last year for trying to traffic thousands of ants valuable to Kenya’s ecosystem, in a case that experts \u2060said \u200bshowed a move in biopiracy from \u200btrophies like elephant ivory to lesser-known species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A court in Kenya on Tuesday charged two men with transporting wildlife illegally after one of \u200bthem, a Chinese national, was arrested at Nairobi’s \u200cJomo Kenyatta International Airport with more than 2,000 live ants last week. Zhang Kequn, 27, was detained last Tuesday while attempting to \u200bleave the country,\u00a0court documents showed. Kenyan immigration officials \u200bhad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":7,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":{"format":"standard","override":[{"template":"1","parallax":"1","fullscreen":"1","layout":"right-sidebar","sidebar":"default-sidebar","second_sidebar":"default-sidebar","sticky_sidebar":"1","share_position":"top","share_float_style":"share-monocrhome","show_featured":"1","show_post_meta":"1","show_post_author_image":"1","show_post_date":"1","post_date_format":"default","post_date_format_custom":"Y\/m\/d","show_post_reading_time":"0","post_reading_time_wpm":"300","post_calculate_word_method":"str_word_count","show_zoom_button":"0","zoom_button_out_step":"2","zoom_button_in_step":"3","show_post_tag":"1","show_comment_section":"1","number_popup_post":"1","show_post_related":"1","show_inline_post_related":"1"}],"image_override":[{"single_post_thumbnail_size":"crop-500","single_post_gallery_size":"crop-500"}],"trending_post_position":"meta","trending_post_label":"Trending","sponsored_post_label":"Sponsored by","disable_ad":"0","source_name":"Reuters","subtitle":""},"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":{"view_counter_number":"0","share_counter_number":"0","like_counter_number":"0","dislike_counter_number":"0"},"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,2362,1129],"tags":[4797,111],"class_list":["post-20195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-east-africa","category-featured","category-security","tag-jomo-kenyatta","tag-kenya"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20195"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20196,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20195\/revisions\/20196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qiraatafrican.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}