More than 120,000 skins of a protected species of alligator were smuggled into Japan during the past seven months using stolen or falsified export documents, a wildlife protection organization said Thursday. Traffic Japan, the wildlife trade monitoring group of the World Wide Fund for Nature, said the South American caiman skins were shipped by a complex route involving at least seven South American and Asian countries before they arrived in Japan. At least 46 tons of the skins, from more than 120,000 alligators, entered Japan in the first seven months of this year through Thailand alone, the group said. It said it believed the skins were part of a larger shipment that was loaded onto Asia-bound ships off the coast of Uruguay at the end of last year. The declared customs value of the skins was about 427 million yen (about $3.2 million), ``but retail value would be four to five times more,'' spokeswoman Cecila Song said. The skins are used in Japan mainly for belts and watchbands. Permits are required for the export of South American caiman skins under the regulations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), an international treaty regulating trade in protected plants and animals, Song said. Japanese officials allowed the shipments to enter the country without proper verification of the export documents, the group said in a statement. ``Traffic's 8-month investigation has revealed a serious lapse of CITES administration in Thailand and Japan, and has uncovered a long paper trail of illegal CITES documents and other ploys involving Thailand, Colombia, Chile, Venezuela and Singapore to mask the illegal origins of the poached skins,'' the statement said. It said Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry had responded to evidence of illegal caiman trade by instituting a new voluntary check system on all imports of the skins. ``But unless they come up with a system involving legal penalties, we don't think there will be any improvement, especially with the high profits involved,'' Song said. Ministry officials were not available Thursday night for comment.
