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The European Commission’s environment chief said he is “looking into” reports from NGOs that a Liechtenstein prince killed a large bear in Romania in an act of trophy hunting.
Environmental groups said last week that Prince Emanuel von und zu Liechtenstein visited Romania in March and shot dead a 17-year-old brown bear nicknamed Arthur on a nature reserve, under the pretext of having a special license to hunt a different bear.
Trophy hunting is illegal in Romania and brown bears are protected by the EU’s habitats directive, which outlaws the hunting of wild animals unless there are exceptional circumstances.
“My services are now looking into the details of this case, and are following it very closely,” Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius told MEPs in the European Parliament’s environment committee on Monday.
“I trust the Romanian authorities investigate this incident in very close details,” he said, answering a question from Romanian MEP Nicolae Ștefănuță from the Renew Europe group.
Agent Green, the Romanian NGO that first published the accusations, said in a statement published earlier Monday that the Romanian environment ministry was at fault for not sufficiently protecting and managing its Natura 2000 sites, including the one where the alleged incident took place.
The Romanian government has launched an investigation into the bear’s killing.
The prince, a part-time doctor who lives in a castle in Austria, issued a statement Friday denying that he had shot Arthur, but rather had downed a different “problem animal” that had been cleared to be killed by Romanian authorities and was 250 meters from inhabited houses. The prince also said he offered his full support to the investigation, according to Austrian media.
“Hunting as a means of maintaining and caring for a species-rich game population and safeguarding its livelihood is a great tradition of our family,” he wrote, adding there had been “false reports and agitation” since the news broke.
Gabriel Paun from Agent Green told POLITICO that according to official documents he had seen detailing the type of bear killed, “only Arthur” could have been the animal found. Paun also said even shooting the female bear with cubs would have been illegal anyway.
The Commission formally warned Romania last summer that it needed to meet EU legal requirements to create conservation plans for its protected nature sites.
CORRECTION: This article has been corrected to include the prince’s response.
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