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BEIJING (AFP) – Authorities are investigating a Chinese zoo where three dozen animals including 13 rare Siberian tigers died recently, amid charges it was harvesting their parts, state media said Monday. The probe of the zoo in the northeastern city of Shenyang will look at whether the animal parts were being used as ingredients in Chinese medicine and other products, Xinhua news agency said. China banned the international trade in tiger bones and related products in 1993, and is a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which also bars such trade. But such transactions exist as many tiger parts, such as penises and bones, are commonly believed to increase sexual potency or cure certain illnesses. Xinhua quoted a manager at the Shenyang Forest Wildlife Zoo as saying that the carcasses of the dead tigers, 11 of which starved to death and two of which were shot after mauling a worker, have been cut up and put in cold storage. Story continues below… But another unnamed zoo worker said the bones had been used to make tiger-bone liquor that was used to “serve important guests”. The deaths, which came to light as China celebrates the Lunar Year of the Tiger, have been blamed on a combination of inadequate funding, an unusually cold winter and poor general conditions at the facility, the China Daily said. Zoo workers fed the tigers cheap chicken bones in recent months as funding dried up. On Sunday, the Shenyang government announced that it had allocated one million dollars to save surviving animals and fund the zoo. Besides the tigers, 22 other animals have died, including rare species that are protected in China, among them a red-crowned crane, four stump-tailed macaques, and one brown bear. The Shenyang government has a 15 percent share in the zoo, which is mainly privately owned. China says it has nearly 6,000 tigers in captivity, but just 50 to 60 are left in the wild, including about 20 wild Siberian tigers. In the 1980s, China set up tiger farms to try to preserve the big cats, intending to release some into the wild. But conservation groups say the farms are used to harvest ingredients for traditional Chinese medicine.

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Homeland Security Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman told Fox News’ Chris Wallace that he wants the Department of Defense to launch an investigation into the shooting rampage at Ft. Hood. Lieberman said evidence indicates that Major Nidal Malik Hasan was probably a “self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist.” The New York Times reports , however, that investigators have tentatively concluded it was not part of a terrorist plot. “If the reports that we’re receiving of various statements he made, acts he took, are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism, and, therefore, if that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act and, in fact, it was the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on American soil since 9/11,” Lieberman said Sunday. According to this morning’s New York Times, investigators have not ruled out the possibility Major Hassan “believed he was carrying out an extremist’s suicide mission,” but so far they have no evidence he was directed into violence or “ever traveled overseas to meet with extremist groups.” Lieberman wants the Department of Defense to conduct a special investigation to see if the shootings could have been predicted. “While the Army and the FBI are conducting the criminal investigation about exactly what happened and what Dr. Hasan should be charged with, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense has a real obligation to convene an independent investigation to go back and look at whether warning signs were missed, both the stress he was under, but also the statements that he was making,” he said. Story continues below… Officials quoted by The New York Times say a continuing search of Hasan’s computer has found email messages exchanged with ideologically radical Muslims, though there is no evidence he communicated with “known terrorists or anyone else who encouraged or helped him to orchestrate the shootings.” Lieberman told Fox, “The new face of terrorism in America would not just be the attacks as 9/11 organized abroad and sending people in here, it would be people within this country, homegrown terrorists, self-radicalized, often over the Internet, going to jihadist websites.” This video is from Fox’s Fox News Sunday , broadcast Nov. 8, 2009. Download video via RawReplay.com

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Lieberman calls Ft. Hood shooting ‘terrorist attack’