JAKARTA, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian authorities have arrested a man testified to set up an animal trap at a Sumatra's Riau province plantation that led to the death of a pregnant Indonesian female tiger with two cub fetuses in its womb, an Indonesian conservancy official said on Thursday.
Head of Riau province's natural resources conservancy office (BBKSDA) Suharyono said that the arrested man, identified as E, was a palm oil plantation worker who claimed that the steel sling trap was intended to capture wild pigs in the plantation.
Cited to the size of the sling trap, Suharyono said the claim was dubious as the trap was large enough to arrest larger animal at the size of a tiger.
"We would further interrogate him. Every people arrested for setting the trap in the plantation always denied that it was intended to capture tiger. They always claimed that it was intended to capture wild pig," Suharyono said in Riau province's capital of Pekanbaru on Thursday.
Riau province BBKSDA would coordinate further with provincial police's crime detectives in its investigation against the arrested man.
If the man is proved guilty for intentionally setting the trap to capture the tiger, he may get 5 years of sentence and fined 100 million rupiah (about 6,700 U.S. dollars), Suharyono said citing the legal consequences for poachers aiming at protected animals.
He added the dead female tiger was found hung with the steel sling by its stomach in a ravine located between Muara Lembu and Pangkalan Indarung villages in Riau's regency of Kuansing Wednesday.
Conveying the results of an autopsy process over the dead female tiger, he said the ill-fated tiger had male and female cub fetuses inside her body.
"The saddest thing is that the tiger was supposed to give birth within the next 14 days," he said.
"Three endangered animals of Sumatran tiger have died tragically because of the sling trap. The animal is strongly protected by conservancy law in Indonesia and in the world as well," he added.
The corpses of the female tiger and its two cubs would later be buried in the yard of Riau province's BBKSDA office, to be covered with concrete so as to prevent theft on the dead tiger's skin and other organs.
The population of the endangered Sumatran Tiger is now threatened by massive expansion of palm oil plantations which take rainforest areas, their habitat in Sumatra.
According to data released by the BBKSDA office earlier, around 400 Sumatran tigers are living in the wild at present, of which 190 are estimated in Riau province.
