where a taste for illegal turtle meat is supporting an underground trade, police said.
Police, noticing some “unusual unloading activities” from their patrol boat, approached the men as they reportedly offloaded the endangered reptiles onto a beach at Tanjung Benoa Bay.
Three men — Gede Kole, 30, Gusti Ngurah Datia, 35, and Nyoman Sugira, 44 — were arrested and charged with wildlife smuggling, police said.
A fourth man, identified as Sudir, fled the scene in the boat.
“Our priority was to rescue the turtles first,” said Sr. Comr. Agus Duta, head of Bali Police’s maritime division.
“As for the fugitive, we’re on his trail.”
The men face up to five years in prison and fines totaling Rp 100 million ($11,700), Argus said.
According to Agus, the men claimed to know nothing about the turtle’s eventual destination.
It is also unknown if there were more turtles still on the boat when Sudir fled, Agus said.
“They all claim they were hired expressly to unload the turtles from the ship,” he said. “They say they don’t know anything more than that.”
The demand for live sea turtles has given rise to a black market in Bali, where animals the size of those seized can fetch prices as high as Rp 5 million a head, said Tamen Sitorus, head of the Bali Natural Resources Conservation Agency (BKSDA).
In 1999, the government passed a nationwide ban on the sea turtle trade.
But high demand drove the practice underground, where animal traffickers trap live turtles off the coasts of Sulawesi and East Java to smuggle them into Bali.
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