Donald Allison was jailed for 12 months A man who tried to smuggle rhino horn out of Manchester Airport has been jailed for 12 months.
Donald Allison, of Preston, Lancashire, hid the two horns in a bronze sculpture as he tried to board a flight to China.
The horns, believed to be worth about £120,000, was from a rhino called Simba which died at Colchester Zoo in 2009.
Allison, 52, who was hoping to sell the items on the lucrative Chinese medicine market, was sentenced at Manchester Crown Court on Tuesday.
UK Border Agency (UKBA) officials seized the horns at the airport after they were smuggled out of the Essex zoo’s crematorium.
Airport-based officials discovered them concealed in Allison’s luggage and investigators later used DNA samples to trace the horns back to Simba.
The 41-year-old rhino died from natural causes in 2009 and its horns were removed after its body was sent for incineration, the UKBA said.
Allison pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to attempting to smuggle an endangered species.
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