The World - News from Aug. 26, 1988

Smugglers used stolen or falsified export documents to ship more than 120,000 skins of a protected member of the alligator family into Japan in the past seven months, a wildlife protection organization said. Traffic Japan, the trade monitoring group of the World Wide Fund for Nature, said the smugglers shipped South American caiman skins by a complex route involving at least seven South American and Asian countries. At least 46 tons of skins entered Japan in the first seven months of this year through Thailand alone, the group said. The skins are used in Japan for belts and watchbands.