The Civil Guard, inside of operation ‘VALCITES’, investigates a person for the crimes of smuggling and another crime related to the protection of flora and fauna in the municipality of Bétera (Valencia). The proceedings have already been delivered to the Court of First Instance and Instruction Number 2 of Liria.
The operation has been carried out by the Nature Protection Team of the Valencia Civil Guard Command, and began in November 2021, when the agents became aware of a possible private collection of specimens.
Over a thousand stuffed animals
The agents located a place of more than 50,000 square meters, which contained a house and two warehouses, inside which there were 1,090 stuffed animals. Of these specimens, 405 belonged to CITES, some of them are even already extinct, such as the oryx dammah, and others are in serious danger of extinction, such as the addax or the Bengal tiger.
Different types of animals were also found with different levels of protection, such as the cheetah, leopard, lion, lynx, polar bear, snow leopard, white rhinoceros, etc. Among the pieces found, 198 were large ivory tusks of elephants, whose traffic is penalized. The value of these more than a thousand animals would be €29 million. It remains to know in detail if all the documentation of each piece is in order.
The investigation has been made possible by the collaboration of the inspectors and facultative technicians of the Technical Unit of the Headquarters of the Nature Protection Service and members of the Legal Institute and Forensic Sciences, which thanks to the Integrated Management and Quality Control System and of the Environment have managed to identify the protected species. It has also had the collaboration of EUROPOLframed within EMPACT actionsof which the Civil Guard Corps is co-leader.