A 27-year-old Chinese national is in custody after Kenya Wildlife Service officers found more than 2,000 live queen ants hidden in his luggage at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi.
Zhang Kequn was stopped on Tuesday 10th March just as he was getting ready to board a flight back to China. When officers searched his bags, they pulled out 2,238 live ants, the majority of them queen garden ants that had been carefully packed for the journey.
The insects were not all hidden the same way. Some were sealed inside test tubes, while about 300 others had been wrapped up inside rolls of tissue paper tucked into his luggage.
Investigators say the ants were destined for China, where certain rare insects are in high demand among collectors and breeders and can sell for significant sums. What made the arrest more notable is that Zhang had already been on the radar of wildlife authorities. He reportedly slipped through a dragnet the previous year when officers broke up a suspected ant trafficking network.
This is also not the first time Jomo Kenyatta International Airport has been the scene of this kind of bust. About a year ago, officers at the same airport arrested two Belgian nationals, a Vietnamese national and a Kenyan citizen after finding roughly 5,000 giant African harvester ants in their possession, also headed for China.
Ant smuggling is part of a broader and growing trade in exotic insects that conservation groups say is putting pressure on wild populations across Africa.
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