A district and sessions court in Sukkur on Thursday sentenced for five years a man accused of killing the Indus River dolphin with an axe last year. The man was also fined Rs250,000.
According to the Sindh Wildlife Department, a trial court for the protection of wildlife heard the case of of the incident that took place in a canal in Sukkur last year.
The department shared an 11 second video of the alleged incident. In it, three men can be seen in the canal, with one of them carrying an axe. A net, visibly tangled, can be seen across the width of the canal ostensibly to catch the dolphins. The man can be seen moving towards the tangled part of the net before the video ends.
The tweet from the Sindh Wildlife Department added that the videos of the alleged incident were verified by the Punjab Forensic Laboratory on the order of the court.
Indus river dolphins are endemic to the Indus river basin, where their naturally murky and silt-laden river habitat means that their eyes are of limited use. Indus river dolphins therefore rely on echolocation clicks to navigate and find food.
It is on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species being one of the world’s rarest mammals and the second most endangered freshwater river dolphin.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, the population of this species has gradually declined because of various factors, including water pollution, poaching, fragmentation of habitat due to barrages, and dolphin strandings in the irrigation canals.
Now approximately 2,000 specimens of this species exist in a small fraction of their former range, the lower reaches of the Indus River in Pakistan.