A pioneering biologist named a "hero for the planet" by Time magazine in 2000 for his work to save the Amazon rainforest has been jailed in Brazil, amid claims that he has been framed.
Marc van Roosmalen, 60, of Dutch background, was jailed last week in Manaus, Amazonas state capital, accused of stealing 28 monkeys found in his home.
Supporters say van Roosmalen is the victim of a witch-hunt because of his stance against illegal loggers. They say he ran an animal hospital and that he has been framed because of his fight to defend the world's largest rainforest from cattle ranchers and soy companies.
"It's a vendetta," said John Chalmers, an English businessman who runs a jungle expedition company in Manaus and has worked with the scientist for four years, accompanying him on fact-finding missions in the jungle.
"The only way to protect the Amazon is to make people aware of all these species. Marco tried to preserve the species and their natural habitat. This does not suit politicians who own large tracts of land full of logs that they want to sell," Chalmers said.
Chalmers said he believed local politicians had jumped on the "bio-piracy bandwagon", stirring xenophobic fears that the scientist was stealing wildlife from the Amazon. "For 95 percent of the population here the biggest assets are timber and land. They want to bulldoze the forest at every possible opportunity. Anything Marco does is contrary to their interests," he said.
Marc van Roosmalen first came to Brazil in the late 1980s, working in Manaus for the Brazilian government. He discovered several unknown species of primate and received numerous awards, including the Order of the Golden Ark from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, in 1997. In 2000 he traveled to San Francisco to receive Time magazine's Heroes for the Planet environmental award. He also worked for the Institute of Amazonian Research, a scientific research unit in Manaus.
In 1997 the influential Brazil-ian magazine Veja wrote a special report on van Roosmalen, known by colleagues in the Amazon simply as "Mr Marco". "He loves to travel through the rivers and forests of the Amazon," the report said. "He doesn't use repellent [and he] hangs his hammock in any tree he comes across."
"The work of researchers like Roosmalen ... isn't just about the pleasure of giving their names to newly discovered animals," the report said.
"The biggest role is to try to prevent animals and plants from disappearing before they are known scientifically," it concluded.
Yesterday supporters said van Roosmalen planned to appeal but they now fear for his life. "He was almost crying," said Chalmers, who visited the biologist in Manaus' public jail this week.
"He's likely to be attacked there because he looks like a foreigner," he said; van Roosmalen had told him that there was somebody killed inside the prison every night.
According to the website of the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper in Rotterdam, the Dutch government could do nothing to help van Roosmalen since he had taken Brazilian nationality in 1996.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
RSS