NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Two Belgian teenagers who were found with thousands of ants valued at $9,200 and allegedly destined for European and Asian markets will be sentenced in two weeks, a Kenyan magistrate said Wednesday.
Magistrate Njeri Thuku, sitting at the court in Kenya’s main airport, said she would not rush the case but would take time to review environmental impact and psychological reports filed in court before passing sentence on May 7.
Belgian nationals Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, both 19 years old, were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house. They were charged on April 15 with violating wildlife conservation laws.
The teens have told the magistrate that they didn’t know that keeping the ants was illegal and were just having fun.
The Kenya Wildlife Service had said the case represented “a shift in trafficking trends — from iconic large mammals to lesser-known yet ecologically critical species.”
Kenya has in the past fought against the trafficking of body parts of larger wild animals such as elephants, rhinos and pangolins among others.
The Belgian teens had entered the country on a tourist visa and were staying in a guest house in the western town of Naivasha, popular among tourists for its animal parks and lakes.
Their lawyer, Halima Nyakinyua Magairo, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that her clients did not know what they were doing was illegal. She said she hoped the Belgian embassy in Kenya could “support them more in this judicial process.”
In a separate but related case, Kenyan Dennis Ng’ang’a and Vietnamese Duh Hung Nguyen were charged after they were found in possession of 400 ants in their apartment in the capital, Nairobi.
KWS had said all four suspects were involved in trafficking the ants to markets in Europe and Asia, and that the species included messor cephalotes, a distinctive, large and red-colored harvester ant native to East Africa.
The ants are bought by people who keep them as pets and observe them in their colonies. Several websites in Europe have listed different species of ants for sale at varied prices.
The 5,400 ants found with the four men are valued at 1.2 million Kenyan shillings ($9,200), according to KWS.
