IT WAS dead of night when the young Somali poacher finally crept slowly towards the watering hole.

The Kenyan game ranger, crouching low in a nearby ambush position, stiffened and tightened his finger round the rifle trigger, straining every sinew for the slightest clue to his adversary’s exact whereabouts.

When the poacher switched on his torch to give enough light to refill his water canister, a single shot rang out, killing him instantly.

The darkened plains of east Africa erupted into gunfire as the poacher’s three accomplices fled into the bush, firing indiscriminately at where they thought their pursuers from the Kenya Wildlife Service were hiding.

“We believe we got the leader. Another was injured. They were almost out of the park. The others made it into more populated areas, and got away,” Danny Woodley, the game warden responsible for security in Tsavo, an area about the size of Wales, said.

Hours earlier, the gang had slaughtered a family of ten elephants, hacking away their faces with axes to gouge out every inch of their precious ivory tusks.

The wildlife service had been tracking them since they entered the park several days earlier, but had been too far behind to prevent the massacre, the worst single case of poaching in Kenya for several years.

Mr Woodley, a white Kenyan, was one of the first to arrive at the killing site. Some corpses lay with their feet in the air, others on their knees, as though they had died begging.

“They were like beached whales in pools of crimson blood, covered in vultures. There were cartridge cases all over the place,” he said.

However, what worried and impressed Mr Woodley was the professional way in which they had been killed: approaching from downwind, the killer took the matriarch first with a few accurate head shots, then as the rest of the confused herd milled around, he finished them off individually with just one or two shots to the head.

“This man had killed elephants before. He knew what he was doing,” Mr Woodley said. The killer had to get close enough for an accurate head shot as he was only armed with a light calibre AK47, he said, emphasising that elephants have poor sight and experienced trackers can get very close before they are sensed.

His suspicions were later confirmed when the dead poacher was identified as one of the killers of elephants in the “ivory wars” of the 1980s. For Mr Woodley, it was just another confirmation that someone, somewhere, was again buying ivory.

Kenya has witnessed a sudden surge in poaching over the past 18 months that evoked memories of the late 1970s and 1980s, when huge herds were destroyed.

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