A gang of poachers killed a rare one-horned rhino at a wildlife park in northeast India, taking to 15 the number of such beasts slaughtered this year, an official said on Sunday. Heavily-armed poachers fired at the rhino late Saturday inside Assam state's Kaziranga National Park and its horn was gouged out, just a day after another giant pachyderm was killed, a wildlife official said.

A Sumatran tiger has killed a cocoa farmer in Indonesia, villagers claimed Wednesday, in the latest apparent attack by the rare wild cat as its habitat is rapidly cleared for plantations. The body of Karman Lubis, 32, was found decapitated around one kilometre (0.6 miles) from a cocoa plantation on Sumatra island at 02:00 on Tuesday (1900 GMT Monday), while his head was found hours later in another area, a relative said.

A speeding passenger train on Tuesday killed a fully-grown male elephant as it tried to cross a railway track cutting through a dense forest area in eastern India. The train rammed into the animal near the Buxa nature reserve in West Bengal's Jalpaiguri district, some 675 kilometres (419 miles) north of state capital Kolkata. The elephant, which died on the spot from the impact of the collision, was pictured lying dead on its back with its trunk bearing injury marks but the tusks intact.

Smuggling the world's largest land animal across an international border sounds like a mammoth undertaking, but activists say that does not stop traffickers supplying Asian elephants to Thai tourist attractions. Unlike their heavily-poached African cousins -- whose plight is set to dominate Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) talks in Bangkok next week -- Asian elephants do not often make the headlines. But the species is also under threat, as networks operate a rapacious trade in wild elephants to meet the demands of Thailand's tourist industry.