Cameroon gorillas return home

2007-11-30 20:30

Johannesburg - Four rare gorillas caught up in a five-year international tug-of-war were expected to finally leave South Africa on Thursday and be flown to Cameroon, an international conservation agency said.

The gorillas, nicknamed the "Taiping Four", were to be flown out around midnight on a Kenya Airways flight from Johannesburg, via Nairobi, and onto Doula in Cameroon, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) said.

The gorillas - a male and three females - first made international headlines in 2002 after being smuggled to Malaysia with the use of forged documents after they were captured in the wild in Cameroon.

In 2004, they were confiscated by authorities in Malaysia and sent to the South African National Zoological Gardens in Pretoria for safekeeping where they have remained ever since.

IFAW's national representative Christina Pretorious said that the gorillas had been loaded into four separate wooden crates earlier in the day and then transported to O.R. Tambo airport on the outskirts of nearby Johannesburg.

"Africa's wildlife is disappearing from the earth right in front of our eyes. The return of the Taiping Four sends a clear message that Africa wildlife is worth fighting for and that international law must be upheld," she told AFP.

The six-year-old primates - each weighing about 100kg - will be sent on arrival to the Limbe Wildlife Centre in southwest Cameroon where they are expected to live the rest of their natural lives, IFAW said.

- AFP