{"id":37286,"date":"2026-03-12T17:54:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-12T09:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/multimetro.hk\/plus\/2026\/03\/12\/kenya-arrests-man-trying-to-smuggle-over-2000-live-ants-in-his-luggage\/"},"modified":"2026-03-12T17:54:00","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T09:54:00","slug":"kenya-arrests-man-trying-to-smuggle-over-2000-live-ants-in-his-luggage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimetro.hk\/plus\/2026\/03\/12\/kenya-arrests-man-trying-to-smuggle-over-2000-live-ants-in-his-luggage\/","title":{"rendered":"Kenya arrests man trying to smuggle over 2,000 live ants in his  luggage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A man was arrested with more than 2,200 live garden ants in his luggage at Nairobi&#8217;s main airport this week amid a rise in cases of smuggling of the insects in Kenya.<br \/>Chinese national \u2060Zhang Kequn, 27, was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Tuesday while he was trying to leave the country.<br \/>Immigration officials flagged a &#8220;stop order&#8221; on Zhang&#8217;s passport after he evaded arrest in Kenya last year.<br \/>Ant aficionados pay large sums to maintain colonies in large transparent vessels known as formicariums, which offer a literal window into the species&#8217; complex social structures and behaviours.<br \/>Last year four men were fined $7,700 each for trying to traffic thousands of ants valuable to Kenya&#8217;s ecosystem in a case that experts said signalled a shift in biopiracy from trophies like elephant ivory to lesser-known species.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A man was arrested with more than 2,200 live garden ants in his luggage at Nairobi&#8217;s main airport this week amid a rise in cases of smuggling of the insects in Kenya.Chinese national \u2060Zhang Kequn, 27, was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on Tuesday while he was trying to leave the country.Immigration officials flagged [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.7 - 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