An unnamed Japanese has been fined 70 million dong (about $4,700) by local police and forest authorities in Vietnam for illegally buying insects caught from a protected forest in a mountainous resort, an official daily reported Tuesday.
The Japanese, said to have been born in 1974 and carrying a tourist passport, confessed to police that he and a Thai friend bought 10,750 insects caught in the Tam Dao forest in a town of the same name about 80 km north of Hanoi, the Ministry of Security's daily Cong An Nhan Dan (People's Police) said.
The purchase violated Vietnamese law on the protection and development of forests, the paper said, adding that the Japanese confessed to having started buying insects from Vietnam's northern forests when he first came to Vietnam in 1997.
The Japanese Embassy in Hanoi, however, said Tuesday it did not know about the incident.