Ghazipur (UP), Aug 20 (PTI) 

The railway police Saturday arrested two suspected women smugglers and recovered 626 turtles while they were taking them from Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur to Siliguri in West Bengal, officials here said.

The cost of the recovered turtles is about Rs 7 lakhs, officials said.

Government Railway Police station incharge Akhilesh Kumar Mishra said the two women from Sultanpur — Lachho Devi and Kanchan Devi — were found on Friday carrying the turtles in a sack in a general coach of Kamakhya Express which was going from Gandhidham in Gujarat to Guwahati.

He said the forest department was informed and a team arrived and counted the turtles.

The women said they had collected the turtles from the nearby areas and boarded the train to take them to Siliguri.

Mishra said there could be a role of some gang in the smuggling of turtles and investigations are underway to find details.

Forty per cent of the turtle species are listed in the endangered category of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN’s) Red List of Threatened Species.

There is a high demand for turtles abroad for meat and use in occult and aphrodisiacs.