ADVERTISEMENTTwo Belgian teenagers who were found with thousands of ants valued at more than € 8,000 and allegedly intended for European and Asian markets will be sentenced in two weeks, said a Kenyian magistrate.
Njeri Thuku, sitting at the Kenya main airport court, said that she would not rush the case but would take the time to review the environmental impact and the psychological reports tabled before the court before pronouncing a sentence on May 7.
Belgian nationals Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, both aged 19, were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants in a guest house.
They were charged on April 15 for violating the laws on fauna conservation.
The teenagers told the magistrate that they did not know that keeping the ants was illegal and had fun.
Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said that the case represented “a change in traffic tendencies – emblematic major mammals with less known but ecologically critical species”.
Kenya has been in the past has fought against the traffic of body parts of the largest wild animals such as elephants, rhinos and pangolins, among others.
Belgian adolescents entered the country with a tourist visa and stayed in a guest house in the western town of Naivasha, popular among tourists for its parks and animal lakes.
Their lawyer, Halima Nyakinyua Magairo, said that his customers did not know that what they did was illegal.
She said that she hoped that the Belgian Embassy in Kenya could “support them more in this legal process”.
In a separate but related case, the Kenyan Dennis Ng’Ang’a and the Vietnamese Duh were accused after being found in possession of 400 ants in their apartment in the capital, Nairobi.
KWS had declared that the four suspects were involved in the trafficking of ants to markets in Europe and Asia and that the species included Messor cephalotes, a distinctive, large and red harvester ant.
Ants are bought by people who keep them as pets and observe them in their colonies.
Several websites in Europe have listed different species of ants for sale at various prices.
The 5,400 ants found with the four men were evaluated at 1.2 million Kenyan shillings (€ 8,04), according to KWS.
