BHUBANESWAR: Athagarh forest officials, who busted a pangolin smuggling racket and unearthed its online trade link, have arrested three middlemen.
The arrested are Biswajit Samal, Asutosh Sahoo and Ratikant Behera of Dhenkanal district. Earlier, the officials had arrested eight persons in this connection and forwarded them to court.
Athagarh Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) Sasmita Lenka said they have managed to establish direct involvement of the three arrested persons in the pangolin smuggling racket. They were a part of the online trading and inter-district smuggling. They have also found their involvement in online trading of the mammals and their scales.
Lenka said pangolin scales have been recovered from them. The accused seem to have been involved in poaching and smuggling of other wildlife animals as a spotted deer horn seized from them.
The accused had formed WhatsApp groups and were also using some websites to send videos to their customers with codes and dealers names as part of their online deal.
The persons arrested earlier had also reportedly admitted their involvement in trading of pangolin.
After detection of online trade link of the racket, the State Wildlife Wing has requested the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB) to probe the inter-state and international trade route linked to this smuggling racket. Meanwhile, Athagarh forest officials on Monday submitted all documents to the WCCB for further investigation.