Working elephant, Salween Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand ...In early 1998 a scandal broke in Thailand when an illegal logging ring was uncovered. Thousands of valuable teak trees had been felled in Salween Wildlife Sanctuary and Salween National Park, floated across the Salween river into Burma and then imported into Thailand stamped as legitimate Burmese timber. Members of the police, military and forestry departments were implicated. The Deputy Director of the Forestry Dept and a local timber trader were jailed in 2005 for bribery. Due to the very difficult terrain elephants belonging to the Forest Industry Organisation were used to recover the illegal timber still in the reserve. Since then several thousand teak logs have disappeared from secure compounds and illegal logging continues in isolated areas of Salween.