4000 Rare Tortoises Found Crammed In Sacks In Garage

This is the moment the Russian authorities arrested two people for illegally smuggling over 4,000 rare tortoises into the country from Kazakhstan and keeping them in potato sacks in a garage.

Officers from the National Guard detained an unnamed Russian man and woman from an unspecified Central Asian country in the city of Orenburg in the south-western Russian region of Orenburg Oblast, bordering with Kazakhstan.

The suspects are accused of bringing into the country over 4,000 Afghan tortoises (Agrionemys horsfieldii), also commonly known as Russian tortoises, categorized as ‘vulnerable’ on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).