Adamou Nouhou is an official with the water and forests authority, the group added.”Both were buying ivory throughout the country before exporting it to Cameroon, indeed towards west Africa, before the ivory arrived at its final destination in Asia. This was really an international trafficking network,” Conservation Justice said.

The two traffickers are set to appear before prosecutors in Libreville on Friday on charges of ivory trafficking and illicit enrichment.Sparsely populated Gabon has huge forests that are home to more than half of Africa’s forest-dwelling elephants.But the country’s elephant population is under constant threat from poachers, with more than 20,000 killed in a decade, according to the National Parks Agency.The world’s black-market ivory trade — which is threatening Africa’s elephant populations with extinction — is mostly fuelled by demand in Asia, where elephant tusks and rhinoceros horns are used in traditional medicine and to make jewellery and decorative objects.