Armed poachers shot in Kenya national park

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Wildlife troopers shot dead three armed men in Kenya’s Mount Elgon National Park while two other suspected poachers were injured but escaped, Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said.

“The officers were on routine patrol in the park when they encountered five poachers, two armed,” KWS said in a statement.

Poaching declined sharply in Kenya from a peak in 2012 but remains a problem, with about 69 elephants and nine rhino killed last year.

Earlier this month, three rhino were found dead with horns missing in Meru National Park’s Rhino Sanctuary, in what Kenya’s tourism ministry said was an act of poaching.

Three months earlier, a prominent American investigator of the illegal ivory and rhino horn trade was found dead in his Nairobi home with a stab wound in his neck.

A conservation group said Esmond Bradley-Martin, who spent decades tracking the movement of animal products from Africa to markets in Asia, was about to publish a report exposing how the ivory trade had shifted from China to neighbouring countries.