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A Texas man was sentenced to four months in custody for smuggling six rare baby spider monkeys over the Mexican border and attempting to sell them over Facebook, officials said.
Sarmad Ghaled Dafar, 33, was also ordered to serve six months of home confinement and pay $23,501.70 in restitution for the cost of quarantining three of the six endangered monkeys at the San Diego Zoo, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California.
“This crime ripped weeks-old baby monkeys from their mothers, disrupted fragile ecosystems, endangered a vulnerable species, and posed significant public health risks,” said US Attorney Adam Gordon.
“This is not merely an economic crime; it is a severe and lasting injury to both wildlife and public safety,” he added.
Dafar smuggled the monkeys into use in June 2022 and in July 2023, the first of which was recorded in a Facebook message he sent to a potential customer, according to the transcript.
“I have monkey coming in 2 week baby monkey…Is a spider monkey… [I’ll] let you know when it is here because they gonna send it to me from California,” Dafar wrote the client.
“Is a spider monkey thos[e] kind go[e]s for 15k and up but I ask 8k,” he added.
Dafar allegedly sent another customer a photo of a monkey under a heat lamp, with another message from August 2023 showing a pair of baby monkeys wearing diapers.
Dafar also appeared to believe himself smarter than the average spider monkey smuggler, calling the suspect who was caught smuggling seven of the simians on August 6, 2023, “stupid.”
“And all adults they make a lot noise and they active. Baby’s most be sleeping and small to hide,” Dafar wrote when someone sent him a news article about the bust.
Officials noted that at least three of the monkeys Dafar smuggled into the US were not quarantined, which is required by law to prevent the spread of disease.
“Some of the most dangerous zoonotic diseases are those that transfer from primates to humans, such as Ebola, Marburg, monkeypox, and simian immunodeficiency virus,” the US Attorney’s Office said.
The three monkeys who were taken by the San Diego Zoo have since been quarantined and transferred to the Brookfield Zoo, in Chicago.
The fate of the three other monkeys Dafar smuggled remains unknown, officials added.
The endangered spider monkey remains a hot commodity for smugglers operating along the US-Mexico border.
Spider monkeys are named for their habit of dangling from trees using their long tails.
They are among the 25 most threatened primates in the world, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS).
English (US)