How the ivory mafia is driving Africa's elephants to extinction

Shortly before 11am on the last Saturday in May last year, a heavily laden white Mitsubishi truck pulled into the Fuji Motors East Africa car dealership in an industrial neighbourhood on the northern edge of Mombasa.

The truck's cargo was not "household equipment" as declared, but 228 elephant tusks and 74 ivory pieces weighing a total of 2,152kg.

When Kenyan police officers raided the car lot five days later, they refused a bribe of five million shillings (HK$422,000), seized the ivory and arrested two men. The bust was one of the biggest in the country's history but the suspected mastermind, Feisal Mohamed Ali, 46, had escaped.

Ali, says Interpol, was "alleged to be the ringleader of an ivory smuggling ring in Kenya", and in November he was listed among the world's nine "most wanted environmental criminals".

A month later Ali was arrested in neighbouring Tanzania, extradited to Kenya and charged with illegally dealing in wildlife trophies. It is rare for an alleged ivory kingpin to be caught, and activists hope Ali's trial will shine a light on the shadowy supply chain that funnels ivory from Africa to Asian markets.

"People who get apprehended are mainly the foot soldiers, the poachers or foreign middlemen," said Mary Rice, executive director of the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency, which recently exposed the scale of ivory smuggling out of Tanzania. "There hasn't been a single kingpin prosecuted."