VLADIVOSTOK. Nov 21 (Interfax-AVN) - Poachers in the Maritime territory have scaled up taking of trepang and its illegal export, mostly to China, a spokesman for the Pacific regional border guard department said on Wednesday.
An underground trepang processing base has been destroyed in the Rudnevo village, the spokesman told Interfax-Military News Agency. It was done thanks to border guards of the Yuzhno-Morskaya picket of the Nakhodka detachment. They detained two residents of the town of Fokino, who took to sea in a small boat without notifying border authorities and started poaching naval biological resources. The detainees had on them a diving suit and 103 trepangs.
It was later established that the poachers supplied trepangs to the Rudnevo base. Border guards and officers of the anti-mafia police department interrogated the detainees, which allowed them to detain the base's chief. They found 1,672 trepangs in the underground shop. A criminal case was brought in.
As many as 19 underground processing bases have been eliminated in the area controlled by the department this year. The bases contained a total of 1.5t of dried and fresh trepang. Another 500kg of dried trepang worth over RUB1m (USD33,440) and about 6t of fresh trepang worth RUB800,000 (USD26,740) have been seized at checkpoints on the Russia-China border.
Research facilities of the Maritime territory studying fishing areas in the Pacific Ocean report that poaching is the main reason of the decline in the trepang population. Its restoration will take at least 10 years, researchers say.