Foreign poachers kill 52 elephants in Mozambique's Niassa reserve

Poachers, mostly identified as from Tanzania, have slaughtered 52 elephants this year from the national reserve park of Niassa, located in the northern region of Mozambique, the state news agency AIM said on Wednesday. The total number of slaughtered elephants in less than two years has hit 124. Last year, 72 in the same reserve was killed by poachers. In most cases, poachers kill the elephants to extract the ivory. Residents told the provincial governor, David Malezane, in a mass rally recently held in Niassa that they constantly found bodies of different species of animals in the forest, indicating that they were victims of poachers. The poaching is linked to insufficient resources for supervision to control the vast forest of Mozambique along the border with neighboring countries. Malezane appealed to the local people to help controlling the country natural resources reporting those who misappropriate natural resources. "Some are stilling timber, others are stilling precious stones. We can't allow those traffickers to continue misappropriating our resources," the governor said.