Three men have been arrested over the shooting down of a British pilot during a helicopter operation to track down elephant killers in Tanzania.
Roger Gower died while tracking poachers in the Maswa game reserve in the north of the country. Officials said his helicopter crashed after being hit by rounds from an AK-47 rifle fired from the ground on Friday.
The mission had been a collaboration between the Friedkin Conservation Fund and the Tanzanian government, which has struggled to respond to an explosion of “industrial-scale poaching” in recent years.
The natural resources and tourism minister, Jumanne Maghembe, said: “The suspects are in the hands of police. They are cooperating, and soon more people making up the poaching gang will be netted and brought to justice.”
Gower’s South African colleague, the safari guide Nicky Bester, leapt out of the helicopter in midair as it crashed and was injured, according to a spokesman from Tanzania National Parks, Pascal Shelutete.
“Three elephant carcasses that were found indicated that whoever shot the chopper down was on a serious illegal hunting spree,” Shelutete said, adding such poachers can be “heavily armed with sophisticated military weaponry”.
Photographs of the crashed helicopter showed apparent bullet holes in the fuselage. Dan Friedkin, the chairman of the Friedkin Conservation Fund, said Gower had been engaged in a joint mission with Tanzanian officials to catch elephant poachers, reports The Guardian.
He said: “Roger was killed while piloting a helicopter during a coordinated effort with the Tanzanian wildlife authorities to track down and arrest active elephant poachers. In the course of this action, the poachers fired upon the helicopter and Roger was fatally wounded.”
A census in June found that the elephant population in Tanzania, which depends heavily on the safari tourism industry, declined from 110,000 in 2009 to about 43,000 in 2014.
Demand for ivory from fast-growing Asian economies such as China and Vietnam, where it is turned into jewellery and ornaments, has led to a rise in poaching across sub-Saharan Africa.
Tanzanian authorities said they had made progress over the past few months in their crackdown on illegal poaching. Last October, charges were brought against a prominent Chinese businesswoman, Yang Feng Glan, 66, who was dubbed the “Ivory Queen” for running a network that smuggled out hundreds of tusks.
