In their terror, the elephants must have sought safety in numbers - in vain: a thick trail of blackened blood traced their final moments. In December, nine elephants were killed outside the Tsavo National Park, in south-eastern Kenya. This month, a family of 12 was gunned down in the same area. In both cases, the elephants' faces had been hacked off to remove the tusks. The rest was left to the maggots and the flies. "That is a big number for one single incident," said Samuel Takore of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). "We have not had such an incident in recent years, I think dating back to before I joined the service."
Mr Takore joined in the 1980s, and his observations corroborate a wider pattern: across Africa, elephant poaching is now at its highest for 20 years. During the 1980s, more than half of Africa's elephants are estimated to have been wiped out, mostly by poachers hunting for ivory. But in January 1990, countries around the world signed up to an international ban on the trade in ivory. Global demand dwindled in the face of a worldwide public awareness campaign. Elephant populations began to swell again. But in recent years, those advances have been reversed.
An Asian appetite for ivory, seen here in Hong Kong, has fuelled poaching in Africa
China to blame?
An estimated 25,000 elephants were killed in 2011. The figures for 2012 are still being collated, but they will almost certainly be higher still. Campaigners are pointing the finger of blame at China. "China is the main buyer of ivory in the world," said Dr Esmond Martin, a conservationist and researcher who has spent decades tracking the movement of illegal ivory around the world. He has recently returned from Nigeria, where he conducted a visual survey of ivory on sale in the city of Lagos. His findings are startling. Dr Martin and his colleagues counted more than 14,000 items of worked and raw ivory in one location, the Lekki Market in Lagos. The last survey, conducted at the same market in 2002, counted about 4,000 items, representing a three-fold increase in a decade.
According to the findings of the investigation, which has been shared exclusively with the BBC, Nigeria is at the centre of a booming trade in illegal African ivory. In 2011, the Nigerian government introduced strict legislation to clamp down on the ivory trade, making it illegal to display, advertise, buy or sell ivory. And yet, says Dr Martin, Lagos has now become the largest retail market for illegal ivory in Africa. "There's ivory moving all the way from East Africa, from Kenya into Nigera," he said. "Nigerians are exporting tusks to China. Neighbouring countries are exporting a lot of worked ivory items (to Nigeria). "So it's a major entrepot for everything from tusks coming in, tusks going out, worked ivory going in, worked ivory going out, worked ivory being made."
Paramilitary poacher hunters
