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Namibian Wildlife Crimes article archive

This archive of published media articles about wildlife crime in Namibia aims to:

  • provide easy public access to published information and statistics
  • enable easy stakeholder access to articles
  • provide a comprehensive archive of wildlife crime reporting in Namibia

Public access to information is a vital component of ensuring community engagement in prevalent issues. Wildlife crime is one of the pressing environmental issues of our time.

Wildlife crime investigations are generally covert operations requiring utmost confidentiality to succeed. Investigations and prosecutions in complex cases may take months or even years to complete. For this reason, the information that can be released to the public without compromising cases is often limited. Nonetheless, the Namibian government strives to share as much information as possible with the public.

The Namibian media has welcomed this approach and regularly publishes statistics and feature articles on wildlife crime. These are entered into the database at regular intervals, creating a comprehensive archive of wildlife crime reporting in Namibia.

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Displaying results 1 - 5 of 5
Sunday, 27 July 2025
Mthethwa C 2025. KZN cops arrest three suspected poachers found with rhino horn and two unlicensed rifles.

Police in KwaZulu-Natal have arrested three suspected poachers who were found in possession of two unlicensed rifles and a rhino horn in Paulpietersburg on Saturday. It’s alleged that the men, aged between 34 and 50, entered a game reserve and stormed up to two security guards while wearing face masks.

Friday, 31 May 2024
Tan C 2024. Cheetahs and casinos: Links between environmental crimes and money laundering in Singapore.

In 2020, a bank in Singapore found that one of its customers had paid $130,000 to a South African supplier for 11 cheetahs. Though the animals were transported directly from the source country to the destination country and never transited through Singapore, the money passed through the customer’s bank account here. The bank, which was not named by the authorities, filed a suspicious transaction report (STR) and terminated the customer relationship.

Sunday, 19 November 2023
Mthethwa C 2023. Former Kruger National Park field ranger sentenced to 10 years for rhino killing.

A former field ranger, tasked with protecting wildlife, has been sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment for killing a rhino in the Nwanetsi section of the Kruger National Park in 2020. Eckson Musa Matumbu was sentenced at the Skukuza Regional Court on Friday. According to the South African National Parks (SANParks), Matumbu was arrested in February 2020 for killing a rhino with an official firearm issued to him and using non-issued ammunition. He was initially granted bail, which was later cancelled; the case was remanded to October 2023 for conviction and…

Friday, 13 January 2023
Kuiper T, Milner-Gulland EJ Elephant poaching rates vary across Africa: 19 years of data from 64 sites suggest why.

t's a grim and all too common sight for rangers at some of Africa’s nature reserves: the bullet-riddled carcass of an elephant, its tusks removed by poachers. African elephant populations have fallen by about 30% since 2006. Poaching has driven the decline. Some reserves, like Garamba in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Selous in Tanzania, have lost hundreds of elephants to poachers over the last decade. But others, like Etosha National Park in Namibia, have been targeted far less.

't Sas-Rolfes M, Challender DWS, Hinsley A, Veríssimo D, Milner-Gulland EJ 2019. Illegal wildlife trade: Scale, processes, and governance. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 44 201-228

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) has increased in profile in recent years as a global policy issue, largely because of its association with declines in prominent internationally trafficked species. In this review, we explore the scale of IWT, associated threats to biodiversity, and appropriate responses to these threats.

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