An
Ecuadoran court has sentenced a German tourist to four years in prison for
trying to smuggle threatened iguanas out of the Galapagos Islands.
Dirk
Bender "will serve four years in prison as stated in the judgment reported
today by the president and judges" of the criminal court that found him
guilty on January 5 of having altered the local ecosystem of the archipelago,
the Galapagos National Park said in a statement Monday.
Bender
was arrested at the airport on Baltra Island on July 8 after park officials
noticed him carrying a suspicious package, which was found to contain four
lizards wrapped in canvas.
The
hidden reptiles were Galapagos land iguanas (conolophus subcristatus), which the International Union for
Conservation of Nature ranks as "vulnerable" on its Red List of
Threatened Species.
The
statement said Bender will serve his sentence in a prison in the Ecuadoran port
city of Guayaquil since the archipelago does not have such a facility.
Time
he has already spent in a provisional detention facility in Puerto Ayora on the
island of Santa Cruz will be taken into consideration, according to park
authorities.
The
Galapagos Islands, situated about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) off Ecuador's
coast, gained fame when Darwin visited in 1835 to conduct research that led to
his revolutionary theories on evolution.
The
archipelago has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1978 for the rich plant
and animal life found both on land and in the surrounding sea.
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