JORHAT: Poachers killed an adult male rhino and chopped off its horn at Kaziranga National Park on Tuesday. With the latest incident, the total number of rhinos killed by poachers this year in the park has risen to five.
Tuesday's incident occurred near the Borghup anti-poaching camp in the park's Burapahar forest range at around 1 am. A group of armed poachers sneaked into the forest range around midnight on Tuesday, killed the rhino and chopped off its horn. They fled before forest officials could reach the spot.
Forest staff found the carcass on Tuesday morning. They also found empty cartridges of .303 rifles from the spot.
Divisional forest officer (Kaziranga) S K Seal Sharma confirmed the incident.
In the meantime, All Assam Students' Union (Aasu) launched a series of programmes in Kaziranga to protest against the government's failure in checking poaching of rhinos.
On Monday, Aasu's Golaghat district unit launched a signature-collection campaign in areas like Bokakhat, Kaziranga, Numaligarh, Badulipar and Komargaon. Besides protection of the rhinos in Kaziranga, it wants the government to hand over cases of poaching to the CBI, deploy Army in the park and take steps to evict illegal settlers from its periphery.
The organization will stage a demonstration in front of the park director's office on February 6.
