Police seize hundreds of 'poached' elephant tusks
Police in Tanzania have seized hundreds of tusks they suspect were removed from illegally killed elephants.
Dar es Salaam regional police commander Alfred Tibaigana said the 1,255 tusks were recovered in two houses.
Two Tanzanians have been arrested in connection with the seizure.
Mr Tibaigana said: "We don't have elephants in Dar es Salaam; they must have been poached elsewhere."
The UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wild animals and plants, or CITES, lists elephants among endangered species.
It puts them in a category allowing limited ivory trade in specific countries that already had stocks to dispose of.
Since the convention's 1997 decision to permit a partial re-opening of the international ivory trade, some of the largest seizures of illegal ivory have been made in Africa.
Hunting is legal under certain conditions in Tanzania but it is illegal in neighbouring Kenya and Uganda.
Both of those countries have large elephant populations that have grown back after serious poaching in the late 1970s and 1980s.
In 1996, authorities in Tanzania seized 4,600 kilograms of ivory after poachers dug up tusks sawn off elephants killed in northern and southern Tanzania.
