BHOPAL: The ongoing probe into the country’s first vultures smuggling racket busted on board a Mumbai bound train in Madhya Pradesh on January 19, has revealed that the highly endangered Egyptian vultures were sourced from the Anwarganj area of Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur city.
A father-son duo hailing from the Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh has been arrested in connection with the alleged inter-state racket.
While 60-year-old Fareed Sheikh was arrested from the Mumbai bound train along with seven Egyptian vultures on January 19 at Khandwa railway station of MP, his son Shamim was arrested five days back. Shamim told the investigators that the vultures were caught from the Anwarganj area of Kanpur, which possibly houses buffalo slaughterhouses and centres where the animal hide is peeled for the leather industry.
The influx of the Egyptian vultures is prevalent in the Anwarganj area, from where men engaged for long in catching birds, caught these vultures and supplied them through intermediaries to the courier, Fareed and his son Shamim.
Not only were vultures given to them for being delivered to Malegaon resident Hashim at Manmad railway station of Maharashtra, but turtles sourced from UP were also smuggled to Maharastra on the same train. While the Egyptian vultures were seized from Fareed Sheikh on January 19, the turtles which were concealed in another coach of the same train the same day remained untraced, sources privy to investigations in Khandwa district confided to The New Indian Express.
Despite efforts to trace the turtles, investigators couldn’t track them anywhere in Maharashtra till Lokmanya Tilak Terminal station, which was the terminating point of the concerned train.
The investigators, acting on inputs generated during quizzing of the arrested father-son duo have conducted raids at multiple places in Maharashtra and UP, but the remaining members of the racket, remain untraceable to date.
Primary information generated from the arrested duo suggests that the Egyptian vultures seized from the train on January 19 were not being taken for being slaughtered or for feeding on dead poultry as claimed by the arrested.
Instead, the rare vultures could have been destined for traders dealing in exotic species. Such traders sell these rare species to exotic species lovers (who keep these as pets) at high prices. The possibility of these being sold abroad (including the Middle East) cannot be ruled out, but anything concrete could come to the fore, only when the remaining players of the racket are nabbed from Maharashtra and UP, claimed investigators.