The International Fund for Animal Welfare said an armed gang of poachers from Sudan had killed the free roaming animals in the Bouba Ndjida National Park, near the border with Chad.
Reports from the surrounding area say many orphaned elephant calves have been seen wandering in the wake of the illegal slaughter of their parents.
The head of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species warned that “this most recent incident of poaching elephants is on a massive scale.”
John Scanlon says there has been an increase in “well-armed poachers with sophisticated weapons (decimating) elephant populations, often with impunity.”
The embassies of the United States of America, European Union, United Kingdom and France have called on Cameroon officials to take urgent action to stop the killing.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature estimated in 2007 that there were only between 1,000 and 5,000 individual wild elephants remaining in Cameroon.