A Southgate man has been sentenced to six months in jail for selling stuffed endangered species.

Robert Sclare, 52, of The Woodlands, pleaded guilty to 27 counts of forgery of a Department of the Environment permit application and 14 charges of illegal buying, selling or displaying the animals for a commercial purpose.

He was sentenced to six months in jail three of them suspended at Snaresbrook Crown Court on Friday last week.

Andy Fisher, wildlife liaison officer for the Metropolitan Police, said: "There is a big illegal trade in endangered species all over the world and there is a significant market in London.

We are pleased with the result of the trial but we have to remember that if people didn't want to buy these animals then people wouldn't have to kill them in the first place."

Sclare ran a shop, Get Stuffed, in Islington, which was thought to house one of the largest collections of endangered animals in England.

Among the animals seized by police were two tiger cubs mounted on a branch, a leopard and an elephant's foot crafted into a coffee table.

After a raid on Sclare's shop in 1998, police needed two vans to remove more than 60 animals.

Sentencing him, Judge Diana Faber said: "When you realised the difficulty you were in you then cobbled together these forged applications to get you out of trouble."

The prosecution came about after a member of the public contacted the World Wildlife Fund, which had already launched campaign called Eyes and Ears.

Sclare's defence claimed that some of the animals were antique and were therefore not illegally sold and that there was no proof that the animals had been poached from the wild.