Two people were arrested for allegedly attempting to smuggle three baby monkeys into the Dominican Republic from Colombia, according to police.
COLOMBIA, — Two people were arrested after allegedly trying to smuggle three baby monkeys into the Dominican Republic, police said.
Cartagena Metropolitan Police said two people were stopped in the Rafael Núñez International Airport in Cartagena, Colombia on May 13 for trying to “traffic” the monkeys from Colombia to the Dominican Republic. Police said the monkeys were in their “intimate parts.”
Neither person was identified by authorities, but police posted a photo on social media of two officers with a man and woman, all their faces blurred, standing in front of the baby monkeys.
The three baby monkeys were roughly one month old, according to the Environmental Public Establishment of Cartagena.
“One of them, a brown spider monkey, was being hidden in a man’s genitals,” they wrote in a video translated from Spanish. “The other two, white-faced monkeys, were being carried by a woman hidden in her clothing, one in each breast cup.”
One monkey died and rescuers suspect it suffocated inside the clothing, according to the US Sun.
“The animal died in conditions that we can only describe as inhumane,” Brigadier General Gelver Yecid Peña Araque told the US Sun.
The other two are now in the EPA’s care, but were “dehydrated, weak, barely clinging to life,” officials said.
No other information, including the current status of the surviving monkeys, is available at this time.