Nairobi  - Kenyan wildlife authorities on Wednesday said they had seized over 500 kilogrammes of ivory at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Airport, the largest haul in years.

The Kenya Wildlife Service said it seized 61 whole tusks in a Kenya Airways warehouse on Tuesday evening. The consignment was on its way to Bangkok, Thailand, via the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.

Another consignment of 637 kilogrammes of ivory, which originated in Nairobi, was intercepted in Addis Ababa two days before.

The ivory most likely came from elephants in Kenya and neighbouring countries, the KWS said.

The ivory trade has been banned since 1989, but illegal sales have thrived with demand being fuelled largely by the Far East.

Hundreds of kilogrammes of ivory destined for the Asian markets have been seized in Nairobi over the last year.

Kenya has lost 125 elephants to poaching this year, an increase from 98 last year and 47 in 2007.

Japanese and Chinese traders in November took part in a controversial ivory sale in South Africa, which raised raised 6.7 million dollars.

The UN-backed Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) gave the go-ahead for the governments of South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Botswana to sell ivory accumulated in their national parks in one-day sales.

However, animal rights groups objected to the auctions, saying all sales of ivory - even legal - stimulate black market trade in the so-called "white gold" and, consequentially, elephant poaching.

The KWS said it was concerned that the sale was not well-supervised.

Kenya's elephant population has doubled to almost 30,000 since CITES banned the ivory trade.

However, the herds have yet to fully recover from the widespread poaching that threatened Kenyan elephants with extinction.

There were an estimated 167,000 elephants in Kenya in 1973.  dpa