New Delhi: During his recent visit to Geneva in July  2005 to attend the CITES Standing Committee meeting, Senior Advisor and Trustee of Wildlife Trust of India Mr. Ashok Kumar was shown four of the shahtoosh shawls from a previous seizure by Swiss authorities. The retailer had the nerve to attach a tag to the shawls declaring them to be shahtoosh.

The highest retail priced shawl from this seizure was Swiss Francs 19500.  However, in a previous seizure in Switzerland a shawl with a retail price of Swiss Francs 30,000 was also seen. The photographs show a new trend in embroidery and colour of shahtoosh shawls. The most heavily embroidered shawl was not pure shahtoosh because these cannot take heavy embroidery.

It may be recalled that Wildlife Trust of India reported that Swiss customs had confiscated 537 shahtoosh shawls from sting operations in the last five years. The shawls were valued at more than 2.5 million euros. Shahtoosh shawls have illegally continued to be in trade and the Swiss seizures indicated the slaughter of over 1600 Tibetan antelope, or chiru.

Shahtoosh – a Persian word for “king of wool” – is the finest wool that exists.  The chiru, inhabits only the remote plateaus of Tibet , Xinjiang, and Qinghai provinces of China . As these animals cannot be bred, they are killed in the wild for their wool. The wool finds its way to weavers through clandestine routes, where it is woven into the finest of shawls that are smuggled out through illegal trade routes.