The court sought his re-arrest, but he had already packed up and left for his native Ukraine. Huzhiavichus spent four months in an Austrian jail, but was released after a not-guilty verdict that was later ruled to have been issued in error. “We were surprised, but we quickly came to understand how the whole thing was organized.” “Increasingly, our analysis found that our perpetrator was part of a large-scale smuggling ring,” said Andreas Pöchhacker, a veteran Austrian customs agent who led the case. Regular customers included wildlife conservation centers, a breeder of Arabian horses, and wealthy bird aficionados across Europe. Police seized Huzhiavichus’s laptop and phones that day in April 2018, their contents providing a rare glimpse into a global wildlife trafficking ring that spanned three continents, smuggling exotic birds from South America and Asia into Europe. The operation was over so fast that the afternoon shoppers at the nearby garden center barely noticed the commotion. Huzhiavichus made a move to run, but was quickly brought down by an officer. Then “all hell broke loose,” he recalled.Ĭommandos from the Austrian Interior Ministry’s elite Task Force Cobra stormed out of a white van, blocking the exits of the parking lot. This was going to be a big deal: The birds were going to be swapped for 133,000 euros ($161,000) in cash. Still, Huzhiavichus ignored his misgivings. But this time the buyer, a Swede, had insisted on doing the handover in a public place, at a strip mall about 45 minutes’ drive outside Vienna. Usually, the wildlife smuggler met customers in the relative safety of their homes. Stanislavas Huzhiavichus had two palm cockatoos and 12 birds of paradise in the trunk of his rental Audi A4, and a gut feeling that something wasn’t right.Įverything was fine with the birds - he had made sure they were fed and watered, and the cockatoos’ black headfeathers were long and lustrous - but the parking lot where he was about to hand them over in exchange for a briefcase full of cash was a little too quiet. Metal rings around birds’ legs are supposed to prove that they were bred in captivity, but the smugglers also found a way to fake those. Although only captive-bred rare birds are allowed to be traded, the smugglers frequently used fake CITES permits, or reused permits many times over, to move birds into the European Union.The carcasses of birds that perished were dumped in the trash.
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