After 15 yr-trial, poacher gets six years in jail

After 15 years of slow trial in a Delhi court, dreaded wildlife poacher Sansar Chand was sentenced to six years in jail on Wednesday. Sumit Saxena reports.

After 15 years of slow trial in a Delhi court, dreaded wildlife poacher Sansar Chand was sentenced to six years in jail on Wednesday.

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The Delhi Police had seized a leopard skin from his possession in 1995. Chand has been a wildlife racket kingpin in the north since the 1970s.

In my view, such offenders need to be dealt with iron hands, particularly when there have been previous convictions and involvement in other similar offences," Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Digvinay Singh said, regretting the delay in trial. Along with the jail term, the court also fined Chand R50,000.

He has a MCOCA (Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act) case and other Wildlife Act cases pending in Delhi. It is his fourth conviction among several cases lodged against him," Saurabh Sharma, counsel for Wildlife Trust of India, said.

Dubbed as the Veerappan of North, 55-year-old Chand has been active in poaching and trading since 1974. Chand and his accomplices, including his mother, son, daughter, wife, brother and other close relatives, have been arrested in as many as 57 cases in a bid to link him to seizure of large caches of animal parts.

These are spread over Delhi, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and even Karnataka.

According to the police, Chand has amassed 45 properties, some of them covering an entire lane in Delhi's Sadar Bazar. He was arrested after Delhi Police, acting on a tip-off, seized a leopard skin from his possession on July 17, 1995.

Sansar had earlier told Rajasthan Police and CBI that he sold to international dealers, mostly from Nepal, passed through Tibet. His interrogation revealed the network and the route of global wildlife trade.