LAGOS - Nigerian conservationists on Friday called for four baby gorillas that were exported to a Malaysian zoo to be returned to Africa, amid fears they were illegally captured in the wild.

Nuhtari Aminu-Kano, executive secretary of the Nigerian Conservation Federation, said claims that the gorillas had been bred in captivity at Nigeria's Ibadan University were false.

"There are no captive breeding facilities for gorillas in Nigeria," he told AFP.

The head of Ibadan University Zoo was not contactable by telephone on Friday but Layi Ajayi, secretary to the university vice-chancellor, told AFP that no gorillas had been bred there.

"That's true," he said. "I'm not even sure that we have any gorillas at the moment."

Instead, Aminu-Kano and other conservationists told AFP, it is far more likely that the rare lowland gorillas were captured in the wild, either in Nigeria or elsewhere in Africa, by poachers who would not have hesitated to kill their parents.

"Only a DNA test can determine where these gorillas are from, but they should be returned either to Nigeria or to their country of origin," Aminu Kano said.

Exchanging animals

Nigeria and Malaysia are both signatories of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) which bans the trade in highly endangered animals born in the wild.

The gorillas were exported earlier this year, via an airport in South Africa, to Taiwan, where they are to be housed in Taiping Zoo in Perak.

In exchange for the gorillas, the Malaysian zoo is preparing to send its Nigerian colleagues Asian animals.

Taiping Zoo officials told AFP last month that the gorillas had legal CITES export documents and were adapting well to their new environment.

AFP has obtained a copy of a CITES export permit issued by the Nigerian authorites on November 6 last year and stamped by the Nigerian Customs service on Jan 10.

The permit is issued to the Ecological Garden at the University of Ibadan, and approves the export of five lowland gorillas, three chimpanzees and six duikers, a small forest deer.

The CITES permit lists the gorillas as captive bred, raising the possibility, conservationists say, that it was issued fraudulently or without proper checks being carried out.

Indochinese tigers and Malayan sunbears

An export permit issued in Ibadan confirms permission for four western lowland gorillas - two females aged 14 months and 24 months, and two males aged 14 months and 33 months - to be exported.

On Jan 7 the South African Department of Agriculture issued Taiping Zoo with a permit, also seen by AFP, to import and re-export five gorillas via Johannesburg airport.

In a separate document, Ibadan University requests permission to import from Malaysia four Indochinese tigers, four Malayan sunbears, eight mousedeer, four black-crowned night heron and four nilghai, a species of antelope.

Aminu-Kano told AFP that while only just over 200 lowland gorillas still live wild in Nigeria in the highland forests along its border with Cameroon, and that gorillas have been smuggled across the border in the past.

Last year the illegal trade triggered a scandal when a baby chimpanzee and a baby gorilla were seized from a Nigerian woman at Cairo airport by Egyptian officials.

Fearing that the apes could carry diseases that contaminated blood could be spread if they were shot, customs officials drowned them in a vat of chemicals, according to the International Primate Protection League and press reports.