Around 700 tortoises being smuggled seized by Andhra police, two held

The Andhra Pradesh police on Sunday arrested two people for attempting to transport close to 700 soft-shell tortoises in gunny sacks in the state's Krishna District.

"The police found two autos in which almost 700 tortoises were being smuggled to Odisha. The accused have been identified as N Anjaneyulu and P Nagabhushanam, who used to collect tortoises from nearby villages in large numbers and send them to Odisha," Kaikaluru police station sub-inspector T Ramakrishna told ANI.

The tortoises were later handed over to Forest Department officials at Atapaka, and a case was registered against the accused under relevant sections of the Animal Cruelty Act.

This is not the first such case to come to light as 1600 Indian soft-shell tortoises were rescued earlier this year from Kaikaluru in February. Indian soft-shell tortoises reside in the freshwaters of Kolleru lake and its neighbouring aquafarms.

At the time, officials said that they were being smuggled to West Bengal and Odisha. Andhra Pradesh also witnesses frequent busts of smuggling rackets that involve transporting the rare Indian star tortoise.

In July this year, officials of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) seized around 500 Indian star tortoises, after they conducted a raid at the Vijayawada railway station.

Investigation officials said that the accused handed the tortoises at Kadiri in Anantapur district and was heading to Ahmedabad, from where the reptiles would be smuggled to various countries.

An Indian star tortoise is one of the most expensive reptiles in the international pet market in a number of countries in Asia like Malaysia, Singapore, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, as well as in Europe and America. They are labelled 'endangered' under Schedule IV of India's Wild Life Protection Act, 1972 and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).