About 600 turtles with pig-like snouts, believed to have been caught in the wild in Indonesia, have been returned home.
The pig-nosed turtles are distinguishable for having a nose which looks like that of a pig with nostrils at the end of fleshy snout.
A farm employee in Hong Kong holds one of the baby pig-nosed turtles.
Hong Kong conservationists seized nearly 800 of the endangered baby reptiles smuggled from Indonesia in January.
It was Hong Kong’s biggest haul in its battle against the illegal pet trade.
Indonesian customs officials display crates of the pig-nosed turtles after they were returned from Hong Kong.
The animals were believed to have been caught from the wild in Indonesia before being brought illegally to Hong Kong.
The record seizure came to light as authorities prepared to release 600 of the surviving turtles back to their native habitat in Indonesia’s remote Papua province.
“It’s the first of its kind [of seizure] in Hong Kong in terms of the number and the species,” Alfred Wong, an endangered-species protection official from the Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department, told reporters.
“They are quite popular in the pet trade; that’s why they are threatened by the international trade,” he said as the baby turtles were being packed into boxes, to be flown to Indonesia on Wednesday.
An Indonesian customs official holds a pig-nosed turtle at Jakarta airport.CREDIT:
The pig-nosed turtles were also threatened because the demand for their eggs and meat, but Mr Wong said they were mostly kept as pets in Hong Kong.
Authorities carried out an investigation into how the creatures came to be in Hong Kong and had questioned suspects, but could not charge them because of insufficient evidence, he said.
He declined to provide further details including how many suspects were involved or their nationality.
The pig-nosed turtles (Carettochelys insculpta) are listed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which imposes international trade restrictions to protect the species from over-exploitation.
The turtles, which were only a few days old when they were rescued, had been kept since then at a privately run conservation farm for care and temporary holding.
They are set to be released into a national park in Merauke, which is located in the south-eastern coast of Papua.
