Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  In March 2012, South African police discovered two ‘still-bleeding rhino horns’ after bumper-bashing in Bedfordview in eastern Johannesburg. Four men were arrested. One of them was wearing a SANParks uniform. The motorist who had crashed into them told Metro police that he had noticed them behaving ‘suspiciously’, trying to conceal a large cooler bag behind a tree shortly after the accident.

  When police opened the bag, they found the ‘bleeding’ horns. Tests later confirmed that the horns were fake and carved out of wood. That same week, a clerk employed in the police forensics laboratory appeared in the Pretoria District Court, charged with stealing several rhino horns from a lab safe and replacing them with plaster of Paris fakes.

  In Zimbabwe, a senior civil servant employed by the country’s mining ministry was arrested in early 2012 after police searched his car and discovered what looked like a rhino horn. Hamandishe Chinyengetere – the ministry’s human resources director – spent the night in jail. Zimbabwe parks officials inspected the horn and concluded it was a cow horn. Chinyengetere was released without charge. A police spokesman told reporters no offence had been committed.

  Days go by before I hear from Thando again. He’s been ‘to the bush’, he says. There are no leads on Mukwena. The man is a ghost. Pehaps he’s left Musina. Nobody seems to know. Thando asks me to fetch him in the township. God-knows and I meet him at 11 a.m. and we drive towards Beitbridge. Just before the border, we turn left past a long line of trucks waiting to cross into Zimbabwe. Customs’ computer systems are down and there are massive delays.

  The road curves and dips and we’re at the fence. We turn left again, away from the army base and the bridge looming up above us, and follow the fence. I count the holes. There must be one every fifty or 100 metres. We drive past one of the army’s lookout posts. A soldier emerges into the sun, stretching and rubbing his gelatinous belly. His shirt’s off and he’s yawning as if he’s only just woken up. We drive on for an hour or more.

  Finally we stop on the outskirts of a farm. Not far from the road are the box-shaped houses of the farm workers. Thando goes inside to find a friend. He’s away for a long time. Godknows fills me in. The man we’re about to meet is one of the transporters. His name is Moshe. His uncle had a reputation in the area – everyone knew him. ‘He was known as Rich. He killed lots of people. He used to rob people out in the bush. If they had cigarettes, he’d take them and kill them. One day someone decided to get rid of him. They drove into him with a car and then rode over the body to make sure he was dead.’

  Eventually, Thando wanders back to the car with Moshe, who’s clutching a quart of beer in a brown bottle. Moshe knows some of the poachers operating in Zimbabwe. He can take us to meet one – his brother-in-law. As we drive, Moshe, sitting behind me, talks about smuggling and the cigarette trade.

  ‘The police escort the cigarettes in their vans. If you’ve got ten boxes, which you’ll sell for R30 000, then you give the cop R5 000 to take [the boxes] in his van away from the border. Then you have to get a guy to transport [the boxes], and that costs.’

  Moshe is starting to brag now. He likes American action movies and it’s beginning to show. ‘We move at night,’ he says. ‘I like to use an Audi A4. You have to speed. We use fake number plates, sometimes Zim plates. We don’t stop for cops. Even if there’s a roadblock, we don’t stop. We make as if we’re slowing down and then, when they come close, we give it petrol.’ He boasts that he’s done the 460-kilometre trip to Pretoria in under three hours.

  We stop at another run-down housing compound on a farm near the fence line. Steve, Moshe’s brother-in-law, lives here. He comes out to meet us. He looks ill and complains of chest pains. He says he recently quit smoking. Steve claims to have gone hunting for rhinos only days before, somewhere in southern Zimbabwe. He won’t tell me where.

  ‘It was too difficult. We couldn’t find any, and it was dangerous because of the rangers. The guys [poachers] who shoot stay in Beitbridge [on the Zimbabwean side of the border]. I used to assist them to get it [rhino horns] across the river and then someone would take it to Johannesburg. It was the real thing. I checked it myself.’ He claims not to know the identity of the buyer.

  ‘Some of the people that kill those things, they don’t even use guns. They use poison. They put it in the water or inside cabbage and leave it there for the rhinos. They once asked me to go and buy that poison. I went to the shop, but when I go there they wanted letters saying I could buy it.’

  The poison he’s talking about is aldicarb. In the townships, they call it ‘two-step’ because, once you’ve ingested it, so the story goes, you will be dead in the time it takes you to walk two steps.

  Aldicarb is the active ingredient in two commercially available poisons: Temik and Sanacarb. The small black granules that make up the poison resemble poppy seeds. Its distribution is meant to be strictly regulated, but it is readily available on the black market. Packets are often sold by informal traders at taxi ranks and spaza shops. It is frequently used as ‘rat poison’. House robbers favour it as a means of killing any dogs on a property before they break in. It is also often used in suicides.

  There may be some credence to Steve’s story. While the poisoning of rhinos is rare, there have been cases. In 2005, five rhinos were found dead at the Nwanedi Nature Reserve in Limpopo. The horns of one of them had been hacked off. Police said at the time they believed a waterhole had been laced with Temik. Dozens of other animals had also been killed.

  Then, five years later, Richard Holtzhausen, the operational manager of Wildlife Ranching South Africa, an organisation established to represent the interests of game farmers, released details of another incident. Fourteen cabbages, cut in half and ‘sprinkled with blue crystals, smaller than the size of ground peppercorns’, had been found in the vicinity of rhino middens on a game farm in Mookgophong. The rhinos were just a hundred metres away when the cabbages were found. None of the rhinos died.

  And in Zimbabwe, there were reports that self-proclaimed ‘war veterans’, who had seized land in the Chiredzi District, were poisoning game and rhinos. A local resident, Nelson Maponga, told a reporter: ‘The poachers are placing poisoned cabbages at animal drinking points so that when the animals come for water, they will also eat them. They will track them until they die, then take the horns off … Most of them are working as poaching agents for South African–based rhino horn dealers.’

  We drop Thando off in the township near the dumpsite. He wants to check on his horn. He’s heard about a buyer who is prepared to pay ‘big bucks’ for rhino horn. Over the past six or seven years, he says he’s made ten to fifteen horns. People have come to Musina from all over the country in search of rhino horns. And they’ll keep coming.

  ‘It’s all a game, bra,’ he says. ‘Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. It is all just a game …’

  16 January 2012

  On the outskirts of Pretoria, Colonel Karel Swanepoel is driving back to the office from a crime scene when he spots a lone figure crossing an open stretch of veld. The man is carrying a black plastic refuse bag in his left hand. It seems heavy, perhaps a little too heavy. Swanepoel, the commander of the Kameeldrift police station in Pretoria, slows the car to a crawl. After twenty years on the force, he trusts his instincts.

  The man approaches the road, walking fast along a footpath. As he nears Swanepoel’s car, he suddenly lurches forward into a run. The cop floors the accelerator. The runner rounds a tree, dumps the bag and keeps running. He doesn’t get far. Seconds later, Swanepoel cuts him off and arrests him. The reason for the 100-metre dash soon becomes evident. Inside the bag are three rhino horns. They’re still ‘fresh’, clearly the result of recent kills. One barely qualifies as a ‘horn’. It is probably that of a calf.

  At the police station, the suspect is booked. A photograph is taken. His fingerprints are recorded. Someone scrawls a case number and a name on the cover of a brown docket-folder: ‘Kameeldrift CAS 71/01/2012 … Rodgers Mukwena’
. The ‘game’ has finally caught up with the ‘Teacher’.

  The Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the Onderstepoort campus of Pretoria University is situated on the second floor of a cold, echoing old building. The doors leading into the lab are fitted with electronic locks and keypads. Large padlocked chest freezers guard police evidence bags and samples of rhino horn. There’s also a ‘cupboard full of weapons’, ranging from knives and axes to pangas (machetes) and even chainsaws.

  It is here that samples from the three horns are sent for analysis. Holes are drilled into them and the filings are collected in plastic containers and bagged. Normally, 20 milligrams is the smallest sample size that can be used to map the DNA of an individual animal. However, the lab has previously managed to extract DNA profiles from microscopic fragments of horn vacuumed up from the carpet of a car.

  ‘We only deal with samples. We don’t keep any horns here,’ says Dr Cindy Harper, who heads up the laboratory. ‘It is such a valuable commodity now that it is extremely dangerous, so the horns are kept in stockpiles [that] are either managed by the police or SANParks.’ DNA profiles of rhinos killed by poachers and horns recovered by police are recorded, along with a growing inventory of live animals, on a computer database dubbed the Rhino DNA Index System, or RhoDIS. It is loosely modelled on CODIS, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation’s mammoth Combined DNA Index System, which stores roughly 10 million DNA profiles.

  Harper’s laboratory uses a set of twenty-five DNA markers and an additional ‘sex marker’ to sequence the unique ‘DNA fingerprint’ of an animal. By contrast, the FBI’s CODIS database uses only thirteen genetic markers to generate individual DNA profiles. Because rhino populations are so small, they are likely to be inbred, and therefore more markers have to be used to make an individual identification.

  Until fairly recently, scientists believed it was impossible to obtain nuclear DNA – the type of DNA used to make individual identifications – from rhino horn. That changed in 2007. A wildlife forensics conference held at Onderstepoort became the catalyst for a research project to determine a means of ‘individually identifying rhinos from their horns’. It was conducted in conjunction with the TRACE Wildlife Forensics Network, an international NGO established to promote the use of forensic science in wildlife crime investi gations. The timing was fortuitous. The following year, rhino-poaching incidents in South Africa would increase sixfold.

  ‘Everyone thought it couldn’t be done, because it was commonly believed that rhino horn was just a clump of hardened hair,’ Harper explains. ‘But if you look at the actual structure of rhino horn, it’s not hair at all. Rhino horn does not contain a bony core. It is made up of cells that grow out from the surface of the skin of the nose. The cell tubules harden and connect together with a matrix of calcium and melanin. It is keratinised or hardened, a bit like a horse’s hoof. And where there are cells, you can find nuclear DNA.’

  The first case in which DNA profiles were used successfully to link smuggled horns to a specific rhino occurred not in South Africa, but in the United Kingdom. A Lancashire antique dealer, Donald Allison, was stopped at Manchester Airport on 30 June 2009 shortly before he was due to board a flight to Beijing. He was carrying what at first appeared to be a bronze sculpture of a bird perched on a log. On closer inspection, border agents discovered that it was made of fibreglass and resin. Inside the log were two rhino horns wrapped in cling film and tape.

  Samples from the horns were sent via the TRACE network to Harper’s team. Investigators had also put out a request to British and Irish museums for information on recent rhino deaths. The Colchester Zoo quickly responded. A white rhino bull, unfittingly named Simba, had been euthanised after falling seriously ill that April. For thirty years it had been one of the zoo’s star attractions. The carcass had been incinerated, but blood samples from medical evaluations had been stored. A DNA profile was extracted. It matched the horns. Later, Essex police established that the rhino’s entire head had been stolen from the abattoir where it was sent to be burnt. It was sold to Allison for £400. He was subsequently jailed for twelve months.

  The second test case made legal history in South Africa. A Vietnamese security guard named Xuan Hoang was arrested at OR Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg in March 2010 after seven rhino horns weighing sixteen kilograms were found in his luggage. Samples were sent to Harper’s labora tory for analysis and matched to a poaching incident a few days before Hoang’s arrest. Hoang was sentenced to ten years in jail. The case set a new legal precedent, as the fact that the horns could be tied to a specific poaching incident played a significant role in the magistrate’s decision.

  Harper says that she and her team have ‘no idea about the background to the investigations’ in which they conduct DNA analysis. ‘I prefer it that way. I get the stuff in and I run it completely blind. I have absolutely no involvement with the rest of the investigation. The big issue is the chain of custody, how the evidence is collected, how it reaches us and how that is recorded. DNA evidence is rarely questioned by the courts – it is the evidence chain that is normally attacked by the defence. We supply DNA collection kits and have done a lot of training.’

  The laboratory employs only a handful of staff and for years has operated on a shoestring budget. By July 2012, the RhoDIS database contained 5 000 individual rhino DNA profiles. According to Harper, the number of poaching cases in which DNA analysis is now being requested is increasing. ‘Theoretically, you can do the analysis in a day. But if you’ve got a backlog and only a certain number of staff, it gets longer and longer.’

  In April 2012, environment minister Edna Molewa gazetted new ‘norms and standards’, which require the collection of samples of horns and blood in DNA kits whenever live rhino are darted to be translocated or treated. These samples are then to be handed over to the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory for profiling. Arguably the only true forensic ‘science’, DNA analysis is now an indispensable tool in South Africa’s fight against rhino poaching. Efforts are also under way to expand the reach of the database to other African, Asian and European countries.

  ‘As an investigation tool, it’s brilliant,’ says Colonel Johan Jooste, head of the endangered species section at the Hawks and an executive member of the Interpol Wildlife Crime Working Group. ‘Without a doubt, it is one of the best tools we have.’

  It had been months since I’d heard anything about Mukwena. The last sighting of him had been in the Bubye Valley Conservancy in Zimbabwe on 27 December 2011, two days after a rhino had been shot dead by poachers. He had been seen driving a Toyota TownAce minibus that had once belonged to Nobby Mlilo, a key poaching middleman from Mpande. Mlilo – an ex-soldier – had been shot dead by Zimbabwean police four months earlier while trying to poach rhinos in the Chipinge Safari area, 236 kilometres east of Masvingo. Mukwena, it seemed, had inherited or taken over the vehicle, which was believed to contain a secret compartment underneath the spare wheel for smuggling rifles. It would be the last sighting of him for a while.

  The arrest of a Zimbabwean poacher by a watchful police-station commander made headlines in a number of South African newspapers. But the reports didn’t name the suspect and there were no journalists in court when the case was first called. The story was quickly forgotten. It was only by chance that I spotted the docket on the desk of a policeman two weeks

  later and recognised the name of the man I had tried to find in Zimbabwe and Musina.

  6 February 2012

  Three weeks after Rodgers Mukwena’s arrest, Harper calls Captain Charmaine Swart, the investigating officer, with the DNA results from the horn samples. It is a match. The horns are from a cow and calf that were poached in the Dinaka Game Reserve, a privately owned game farm in the Waterberg Mountains 230 kilometres north of Johannesburg. The incident had occurred two weeks before Mukwena’s arrest.

  Confronted with this information, Mukwena initially agrees to co-operate with the cops. Under police escort, he is taken to Dinaka to formal
ly ‘point out’ the crime scene and walk investigators through the details of the crime. He denies killing the calf, blaming it on an accomplice who, he claims, shot it to stop it ‘bothering’ them while they cut off the cow’s horns. He names the henchman as Never Ndlovu, the same man who had accompanied Hardlife Nkomo and Life Mbedzi on their ill-fated 2009 incursion into Bubye. Ndlovu was arrested four months after that incident, but had been released on bail and disappeared before he could be sentenced. At the time of writing, there was still a warrant out for him in Zimbabwe and a R5 000 reward for any information leading to his arrest.

  Two days after the ‘pointing out’, Captain Swart receives a call on her cell-phone from a man calling himself ‘Mike’. He claims to be Rodgers Mukwena’s brother and says he would like to discuss the case with her and the possibility of arranging bail for Rodgers. The matter is out of her hands, Swart says. Mike makes Swart an offer: he’ll pay her R13 000 if she can ‘make a plan’ to lose the docket and arrange for Rodgers to ‘escape’ on the way to his next court appearance. Swart thinks it over, then tells Mike to call her back in a few days to discuss the details. They eventually agree to a meeting at a Wimpy fast-food restaurant in Pretoria North. The rendezvous is set for 11 a.m. on 15 February, two days before Mukwena is due back in court.

  Mike is waiting for Swart at the Wimpy when she arrives. She had called him earlier and told him what she would be wearing. He nods in recognition as she pushes her way through the glass doors. They take a seat in one of the red booths and order coffee. ‘Is everything organised?’ Mike asks. ‘Yes,’ Swart says. One of her colleagues will be taking Rodgers to court and will ‘let him go and make it seem like he escaped’.