The North Jakarta district court jailed Ngo Van Toan to two years for skippering a Mongolian-flagged ship which had transported some 15,000 cubic meters of rare timber, said Sareh Wiyono.

Prosecutors had earlier demanded a four-year jail sentence for Ngo, who captained his boat from Papua and was headed towards China via Singapore last December, he said. Indonesian coast guards intercepted Ngo's boat in the Java Sea while sailing to Singapore.

Ngo's lawyers would appeal the verdict, Wiyono added.

A recent forestry ministry report said illegal logging cost the state some 90 trillion rupiah (10.11 billion dollars) annually.

A 2002 report by the World Resources Institute, Global Forest Watch, and Forest Watch Indonesia Reports said Indonesia was losing nearly two million hectares of forest annually -- an area half the size of Switzerland.

The forest cover in 1950 of 162 million hectares had fallen by more than one-third to 98 million hectares by 2000, they said.

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