Zimbabwean police investigating an ivory-smuggling racket will soon question former ruler Robert Mugabe's wife Grace, who is accused of arranging shipments abroad, a government-owned newspaper reported Friday.

The Herald newspaper, once the mouthpiece of the Mugabe regime, said police were making progress in their probe into Grace's role in allegedly smuggling ivory to China, the United Arab Emirates and the United States.

"We are closing in with our investigations," a police source told the paper under the headline "Police tighten noose on Grace Mugabe".

"We have also picked up and questioned several suspects whom we believe are linked to the case."

Documents from the Zimbabwe parks authority allegedly accuse Grace Mugabe of ordering officials to grant her permits to export millions of dollars of ivory as gifts to foreign leaders.

Once outside Zimbabwe, the ivory was routed to black markets.

A police spokesman declined to comment to AFP on Friday.

Grace Mugabe had been tipped as a candidate to succeed her husband, 94, who ruled Zimbabwe since independence from British colonial rule in 1980.

But he was forced to step down in November last year following a military takeover that ushered former vice president Emmerson Mnangagwa to power.

Grace has not been seen in public since, but she attended a press meeting her husband held at their house in the capital Harare last month.

She was known for her lavish spending habits and fierce verbal attacks on her husband's perceived critics.

Chinese man jailed by Dutch court for smuggling rhino horn
The Hague (AFP) April 6, 2018 –

A Dutch court Friday sentenced a Chinese man to a year in jail for smuggling five rhino horns and four other horn objects worth about 500,000 euros ($613,000) in his luggage.

The man was caught by customs officials at Schiphol airport in December, as he transited through Amsterdam on his way from South Africa to the eastern Chinese metropolis of Shanghai.

"The Amsterdam court has sentenced a 30-year-old man of Chinese nationality to 12 months in prison for smuggling rhino horns and falsifying a visa," the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority said.

It recalled that trading in endangered species is banned under the CITES convention prohibiting sales of protected animals and plants.

South Africa is battling a scourge of rhino poaching fuelled by insatiable demand for their horn in Asia. The country's ministry of environmental affairs said earlier this year that 1,028 rhinos were slaughtered in 2017.

In the last eight years alone, roughly a quarter of the world population of rhinos has been killed in South Africa, home to 80 percent of the remaining animals.

Most of the demand comes from China and Vietnam, where the horn is coveted as a traditional medicine, an aphrodisiac or as a status symbol.