At long last it's official - the lie of the tiger

By Li Xinran  |   2008-6-30  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

THE worst-kept secret in the nation was confirmed yesterday - the photos of the "in-the-wild" South China Tiger released amid much fanfare last year are fake.

The farmer-photographer who claimed he risked his life to get the snaps of the animal that is believed to be extinct is under arrest and in disgrace and 13 provincial officials have been dismissed from their posts over the scam.

The Shaanxi Province government in northwestern China confirmed that the pictures were bogus at a press conference yesterday.

Zhou Zhenglong, the photographer, is being held on charges of swindling the government out of 20,000 yuan (US$2,915), the prize he received for his "discovery" of the tiger. The Shaanxi provincial forestry department has ordered him to return the cash reward.

Police and experts discovered that the tiger in Zhou's photos was superimposed on a forest scene and so-called claw marks were from a wooden model.

A police officer at the press conference displayed the picture and the wooden claw they seized from Zhou's home.

Sun Chengqian and Zhu Julong, two deputy directors of the provincial forestry department, have been sacked over the affair, the China News Service reported.

No civil servants or other villagers were directly involved in the photo-taking, said Bai Shaokang, spokesman and vice director of Shaanxi's public security department.

Police and experts researched all the tiger photos and the scene using high-tech measures. These revealed that the space in the picture was too small for a real tiger to crouch. In fact, the animal in the photos was no taller than 30 centimeters when the scale of the forest was determined.

Zhou reportedly confessed that he borrowed the tiger picture from a local villager and a digital camera from his relative, Xie Kunyuan, a business official in Shaanxi's Zhenping Town.