Five suspects were due for questioning this afternoon at a police station a few hours west of Bangkok in the killing, cooking, and eating two Bengal tigers.
The five men were to be handed over to the Pilok Police Station in Kanchanaburi province at around 3pm, according to regional wildlife protection officer Niphon Jamnongsirisak in neighboring Ratchaburi province.
Earlier this week, a team of park rangers out on patrol discovered tiger meat being cooked on a grill at a campsite near the Thai-Myanmar border in Kanchanaburi’s Thong Pha Phum district. The five people there escaped.
Among the items seized from the site were two Bengal tiger pelts, four firearms and 29 other “illegal items,” Niphon said.
A preliminary examination indicated that one tiger pelt belonged to a male that weighed about 80 kilograms and the other was from a 50-kilogram female. Charoen Jaichon, chief of Thong Pha Phum National Park, believed that the hunters intended to sell their meat for big bucks.
