Source - Planet Ark/ReutersCUIABA, Brazil - Brazilian police on Wednesday broke up a suspected illegal logging ring involving Indians, environmental officials, ranchers and businessmen believed to have felled and sold around 2,000 truckloads of logs from an Indian reserve in the Amazon.
A police statement said 17 people had been arrested and dozens more suspects were being hunted in four states.
Those detained included three leaders of the Trumai Indian tribe who lived in the Xingu National Park and four officials of the environmental protection agency IBAMA who had issued permits authorizing logging in prohibited areas of the reserve.
About 1.4 million cubic feet (40,000 cubic metres) of wood, equivalent to 2,000 truckloads, were extracted from Xingu over an unspecified period of time and transported and sold to lumber businesses, the police said.
The Xingu National Park covers 11,000 square miles (28,000 sq km) in Mato Grosso state in the southern Amazon basin and is home to about 4,000 Indians from 14 tribes.
Officials tracking the destruction of the world's largest rain forest estimated that about 6,500 square miles (16,700 sq km) of forest -- an area about the size of Hawaii -- could have been lost legally or illegally in the year to July 2006.
Corruption inside IBAMA, which was reorganized last month, has been part of the problem. Dozens of IBAMA officials have been arrested in recent years for similar schemes.
Story Date: 18/5/2007
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