POLICE on the Greek island of Crete said they had arrested a gang of grave robbers who looted about 1000 artefacts from ancient burial sites.
Two local farmers and a construction worker were arrested while trying to sell 120 artefacts to an unidentified foreigner, police said, in what is being described as one of the worst cases of ancient grave looting ever reported in Greece. Police said they found a further 800 objects in subsequent searches at the homes of the suspects, including two bronze swords dating from around 1200 BC. Crete's general police inspector Nikos Bagiartakis said some of the objects recovered were of "unique value". He added: "I consider the case to be a major strike against the networks selling off our national heritage."
http://www.news.com.au/
Police recover stolen Hodgkins painting
09 May 2003
A $65,000 Frances Hodgkins painting stolen from an Auckland art gallery in February has been recovered from a warehouse.
The 1930s watercolour, October Landscape, was found in South Auckland yesterday. Police also located two other stolen paintings at the property. All three artworks were taken in a raid on a Parnell gallery, during which the thief lost part of a finger. Gallery owner Peter Jarvis said: "I'm so delighted, I never gave it a thought that they'd ever be recovered. I thought that they would have left the country within a very short time. "The police deserve to be praised for this."
http://www.stuff.co.nz/
Federal authorities file rare looting case
By The Associated Press
SPOKANE — Federal prosecutors have filed rarely used charges against a man accused of looting Indian grave sites behind Grand Coulee Dam.
Leaders of the Spokane Tribe say the charges are long overdue because looting is common every year when Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind Grand Coulee, is drawn down. Richard C. Graham, 34, is charged with excavating, removing, damaging or altering an archaeological resource on the south side of the Spokane River in Lincoln County. He pleaded innocent Tuesday and was released on personal recognizance after a brief appearance in federal court. Archaeological sites dot both sides of the reservoir from Grand Coulee Dam north to the Canadian border. The Spokane Tribe and bands from the Colville Confederated Tribes for centuries camped along the Spokane and Columbia riverbanks. “Our ancestors had seasonal camps up and down the Spokane River,” said Bryan Flett, heritage coordinator for the Spokane Tribe.
The ancient Indians and their possessions were buried where they lived, along the riverbanks that provided food and water. The areas are posted as archaeological sites, protected by federal laws. Digging in culturally sensitive areas can result in a year in jail and a $100,000 fine, but most violators just get a warning. In Graham’s case, a National Park Service ranger videotaped the construction worker in March 2000 unearthing an awl, a crudely made scraper and a piece of horse’s jawbone, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Hopkins said. The artifacts are believed to be more than 1,700 years old. Hopkins would not explain why his office waited three years to bring formal charges.
National Park Service Ranger Chris Rugel pushed to have the case prosecuted. “This case is really our first big case dealing with theft, tampering and vandalism to an archaeological site,” Rugel said. “We consider this a crime,” he said. “Now the judges and the courts need to see this, too.” Graham’s attorney, Carl Oreskovich, said his client had no intention of taking the artifacts. “He was walking along the riverbank at an archaeological site and saw something sticking up,” Oreskovich said. “He kind of dug these items up with his hands and feet.” The archaeological sites are particularly vulnerable to vandalism when the pool behind Grand Coulee is drawn down each spring to make room for the melting snowpack.
Tribal elder Vi Frizzell said the looting is painful for Indians.
“What would the white people think if we came to town and started digging up your graveyards and cemeteries?” she said. Indian leaders can’t understand why federal authorities took three years to file charges against Graham. “I don’t think it’s risen to the level of a horrific crime yet with the criminal justice system,” Flett said.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
Government Returns Stolen Tablet to Egypt
By TARA BURGHART The Associated Press Thursday, May 8, 2003; 3:15 AM
NEW YORK - The federal government has returned to the Egyptian consulate a 2,600-year-old limestone tablet that was recovered as part of an investigation into stolen antiquities.
The tablet is a stela, a ceremonial or decorative stone often found in tombs and temples. The one returned to Egyptian officials Wednesday was covered with human figures and hieroglyphic symbols, FBI spokesman James Margolin said. Similar in size to a "tall, narrow tombstone," Margolin said, the sandy-colored tablet was recovered as part of the FBI's investigation into art dealer Frederick Schultz, who was found guilty of receiving and possessing stolen Egyptian antiquities by a jury in February 2002. Schultz, who operated Frederick Schultz Ancient Art in Manhattan, was sentenced to 33 months in prison. Edna Russmann, a curator in the Department of Egyptian, Classical and Ancient Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, said she had seen the stela only in photos until Wednesday. "It more than lived up to expectations," she said. "It's an extremely fine piece."
Based on the text and carvings, Russmann said the stela was commissioned by a man who served Psamtik I, a pharaoh who reigned from 664 B.C. to 610 B.C. The man's grandfather had been a vizier, the most important secular official in ancient Egypt. In the upper half of the stela are depictions of the man who commissioned it, his father and his grandfather, along with two women, all facing Osiris, the god of the underworld, Russmann said. Officials with the Egyptian consulate said the stela would be returned to Egypt immediately and eventually placed on exhibit. Margolin said the stela had been bought from an art gallery in another country by an American who thought he was making a legitimate purchase. He wouldn't say what the American paid for it or what it might be worth.
In a bind over Bill of Rights
Man who tried to sell copy may face charges
By MATTHEW EISLEY, Staff Writer
Federal authorities hope to file criminal charges soon against the man who tried to sell an original draft of the U.S. Bill of Rights, which North Carolina claims was stolen from the state Capitol at the end of the Civil War. Meanwhile, the federal government has filed court papers agreeing that the disputed document, which undercover agents seized from a broker in March, belongs to North Carolina. It's in federal custody in Raleigh.
The state and Wayne E. Pratt, a Connecticut antique dealer who had offered to sell the historic document to a Philadelphia museum for $5 million, both claim they legally own it. One of Pratt's lawyers, Tom Dwyer of Boston, asked federal Judge Terrence Boyle at a hearing Wednesday in Raleigh to delay the civil case over the document's ownership until the end of June, while the criminal case unfolds. "There is in fact a federal grand jury investigation going on," Dwyer told Boyle. "I met with the U.S. attorney about it today."
U.S. Attorney Frank Whitney declined later to discuss the case.
Dwyer said Pratt has a dilemma: If he files a detailed civil lawsuit over the ownership issue, he might reveal information that could be used against him in the criminal investigation. Pratt's right not to provide information that would hurt him in the criminal case comes from the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights -- the first 10 amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect individual freedoms against government power. The document at issue is a draft copy of the proposed Bill of Rights sent to the states in 1789 to encourage them to ratify the Constitution and establish the nation. North Carolina officials say a Union soldier stole it from the Capitol in 1865, it has been sold several times since then, and three times was offered for sale to the state. The state refused to buy it, saying it couldn't and wouldn't pay for stolen public property. "We've had experts from the state of North Carolina and George Washington University confirm beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is the original Bill of Rights that George Washington sent to North Carolina," Whitney told Boyle during the hearing.
Dwyer said the document's identity, history and ownership haven't been proven, and should be determined in a jury trial. "Just because the U.S. attorney says this document is the property of North Carolina doesn't mean it is," he told Boyle. "One of their experts told my people two years ago that it wasn't. So we've got a long road to go. "We are going to trial on this case. There are so many issues in this case, your honor, you're going to love it." And Boyle might. He's quite the amateur historian. When Whitney mistakenly said the N.C. General Assembly had ratified the U.S. Constitution after receiving the proposed Bill of Rights, Boyle corrected him: a state convention, not the legislature, ratified the Constitution in November 1789.
The Bill of Rights, which North Carolina approved the next month, was added to the Constitution two years later. A New Jersey native, Boyle played Southern at one point when the Bostonian Dwyer apologized for rising to speak before the judge had invited him to. "We don't have any high standards of conduct or manners," Boyle teased. "We're a low-key court down here in the country." Boyle, whose job the Constitution established, promised to rule promptly on the delay.
Staff writer Matthew Eisley can be reached at 829-4538 or meisley@newsobserver.com.
From: David Brancaleone davidbrancaleone@lootedart.com To: "'CulPropProtNet / MusSecNetwork (Ton Cremers)'" securma@xs4all.nl
Subject: additions Lootedart.com website
Date sent: Thu, 8 May 2003 12:58:45 +0100
Dear Ton
I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that the Central Registry Homepage now has a LOOTING TODAY section which provides our modest contribution to the attacks on cultural property the international community is suffering. We have begun posting a few stories (especially policy-related) but also the principal legal instruments which the international community ratified many years ago. We also plan to file a report very soon on the excellent work of the Museum Security Network. The news reports we read and statements given to the Press in relation to the recent conflict in Iraq appear to ignore that the problems associated with war and civil unrest following the breakdown of a nation's infrastructure, have been dealt with very successfully in the past by the British and US governments.
Concerned with the problem of protecting the European cultural heritage in the face of war, they established policies and an organisation to implement them as early as 1943 (MFA&A Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives). The MFA&A was set up to protect art and cultural materials from looting, loss or displacement in European war zones. The following year the ALIU (Art Looting Investigation Unit of the Office of Strategic Services) was set up at the behest of Roosevelt's Roberts Commission, to provide the MFA&A.with an intelligence unit. The ALIU interrogated over two thousand people involved in art looting and later produced Detailed Interrogation Reports (DIRs) based on them. More importantly, both organisations were effective in the field. They documented war damage and prepared lists of sites needing protection. They succeeded in their misison to prevent Allied occupation forces "from damaging national monuments and from damaging or looting public or private collections," to provide aid "to damaged monuments, fine art and archives collections". After the war they were responsible for adminstering and carrying out partial restitution.
It has been done before and can, and should, be done again. In the interests of our common cultural heritage there needs to be a permanent international organisation (to carry out the work of prevention, policing and intelligence) which ensures that the Hague Conventions and other international agreements are adhered to.
David Brancaleone MA (UCL) PhD (Warburg) Director of Research and Deputy Director of The Central Registry of Information on Looted Cultural Property (1933-1945)
76 Gloucester Place, London W1U 6HJ. Tel: +44 (0)20 7487 3401. Fax: +44 (0)20 74874211. www.lootedart.com <
IRAQ
Looters go to source to steal Iraq artifacts
By Paul Salopek Tribune foreign correspondent
May 7, 2003
NIMRUD, Iraq -- Nobody except a few shepherds heard the gun battle that erupted the other night in this ruined, 3,000-year-old city of Assyrian kings that overlooks the wrinkled plains of Mesopotamia.
To be sure, it wasn't much of a fight. Only 30 or 40 shots were fired. And there were no casualties. None, that is, except humanity's priceless inheritance of ancient art. Holding off frantic security guards with well-placed rifle fire, a gang of armed looters methodically attacked Nimrud in the predawn darkness Saturday, prying off world-famous wall carvings and dragging them on blankets to waiting cars. The guards fired back until their ammunition gave out. And then, mockingly, the thieves shouted that they would be returning soon for more artifacts. "They called out to us by name," said Muafaq Mohammad Ismael, a beleaguered antiquities guard whose trailer at Nimrud is punctured by bullet holes. "They threatened our families if we continued to resist. So we won't." A month after Iraq's museums were ransacked in the chaos of Saddam Hussein's downfall, thieves have started targeting the very source of this war-battered land's immensely long history--archeological sites that hold some of the earliest and most gloried remnants of human civilization.
"This isn't about museums anymore. This is about the last resource of our history: what's underneath our soil," said Menhal Jabr, director of the looted Mosul Museum, the largest in northern Iraq. "It's an international tragedy," Jabr said. "Most modern civilizations have their roots here." At least two ancient sites in northern Iraq, Nineveh and Nimrud, have been hit by pillagers in recent days, local archeologists say. In Nineveh, the hometown of the Old Testament prophet Jonah, looters last week tunneled into a tel, or man-made hillock, in search of gold ornaments or jewels.
Relief slabs carted off
And last weekend at the stone palaces of Nimrud, where an Assyrian king named Assurnasirpal once held a royal feast for 70,000 guests about three millenniums ago, gun-toting tribesmen from surrounding villages took sledgehammers and crowbars to alabaster sculptures that had been exhibited in museums around the globe. Chunks of two large wall slabs bearing the likeness of bearded angels were carted off. A third slab, weighing hundreds of pounds, was badly cracked when the robbers tried unsuccessfully to pull it from a wall. Unfortunately, such brutal assaults on Iraq's past are not new. Pilfering at archeological sites exploded in Iraq soon after the United Nations imposed tough economic sanctions on the country following the 1991 Persian Gulf war, experts say. The temptation was obvious: Iraq is a gold mine of artifacts, from the jeweled hoards of Ottoman sultans to the clay writing tablets of biblical cities such as Babylon to the stone tools of Neanderthals buried under pulverized, 50,000-year-old bouquets of flowers in the caves of Shanidar.
The most vulnerable corner of the country includes the age-worn plains of northeastern Iraq, Jabr said, because a stabilizing U.S. military presence is thinnest there. In that vanished heartland of the sprawling Assyrian empire, Iraqi researchers have logged more than 1,500 archeological sites. Only two still remain guarded by ragged and long-unpaid antiquities police. Nimrud, known in the Old Testament as Calah, is one of them. Nimrud used to be a regular stop for foreign tourists hoping to glimpse the origins of human civilization in the Fertile Crescent, the storied swath of farmland between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers where the practices of city building, writing and law first took shape some 5,000 years ago. Impressive 20-foot statues of winged bulls with human heads still stand sentinel at the city gates to terrify intruders. But on April 10, the day after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, that ancient ruse failed abysmally. "People started arriving that same night," said Awad Omeri, 47, a guard at the ruin. "That's when our own war started."
The recent clashes rocking Nimrud seem more like scenes from the city's 2,900-year-old walls than episodes from a modern conflict. Roving bands of looters from the neighboring Al-Jaburi tribe have laid siege to the city at night, boring through walls and shooting locks off warehouse doors. The site's half-dozen guards--poorly equipped and technically unemployed since the fall of Hussein's government--fought them off.
Guards finally overwhelmed
For an early-warning system, the guards dug a foxhole atop Nimrud's eroded ziggurat, or stepped pyramid. They stubbornly patrolled the site's cut fence. But finally, on Saturday, they were overwhelmed. "More than 10 men came at night armed with AK-47s," said Ismael, 28, a skinny, exhausted-looking man who has been providing security at Nimrud for four years. "When we ran out of ammunition, they threatened our families. That was the end." Demoralized, the small police force has threatened to quit. Iraqi museum officials have begged the U.S. military to intervene. The 101st Airborne Division, the main U.S. unit posted to nearby Mosul, dispatched a patrol to the vulnerable ruin Sunday. "We'll stay here a while and maybe send up some flares at night to scare off the bad guys," said Capt. Tom Ehrhart, 29, the platoon commander. "But the long-term job of protecting this site lies with the Iraqis."
U.S. troops had seen archeological sites marred by far more sinister abuses than looting, Ehrhart said. At Babylon, the city of the famed king and lawgiver Hammurabi, soldiers had watched as local families probed the ground with shovels, exhuming bodies from mass graves. At Nimrud, by contrast, the mood was more puzzled than grim. Troops kicked at shell casings scattered in a royal courtyard. The Americans took snapshots of each other standing in front of an exquisite carving of Assyrian angels that had been smashed by thieves. "Why, now that people are liberated, would they want to destroy the history of Iraq?" an earnest U.S. sergeant asked the guards through a translator.
The disheveled guards, none in uniform, looked embarrassed.
"We asked them the same thing," said Ateya Ibrahim Ateya, who had exchanged shots with the looters Saturday night. "They said this nation gave them nothing. They cursed its history." The looters would return, Ateya said, as soon as the Americans left Nimrud.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Recovery of looted Iraqi treasures is slow
By Bill Glauber Chicago Tribune
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Warrior and prosecutor, classicist and amateur boxer, Marine Col. Matthew Bogdanos faces one of the great legal and investigative challenges of his career: getting to the bottom of the plunder of the National Museum of Iraq. Bogdanos was dispatched here last month to help investigate a case that swirls with unanswered questions over how and why one of the world's great repositories of antiquities was looted in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein.
He has surveyed a museum that became a crime scene.
He has led raids to try to retrieve stolen goods and watched as some people have returned works to the museum. He also has worked with museum curators to compile a list of the most important missing treasures. "It's heart-rending to see pieces on the floor that I recognize, that I have read about," said Bogdanos, 46. The native New Yorker is well-versed in antiquities and law. He received a master's degree in classics and a law degree from Columbia University, and is an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, who once prosecuted rapper Sean "P. Diddy" Combs in a 1999 nightclub shooting. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the reservist was called to active duty with the Marines. Bogdanos was involved in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction and rooting out violations of U.N. sanctions in Iraq. But on April 20, he was shifted to the museum investigation and told to assemble a team with knowledge of smuggling.
After a furious battle in the neighborhood, with Fedayeen Saddam guerrillas entering the museum compound to fire on advancing U.S. tanks, the facility was looted April 10-12. Art experts and law-enforcement officials met in France yesterday to create a database of items looted. U.S. Customs agents announced yesterday that investigators, working with military officials and Iraqi authorities, have recovered about 700 artifacts and located 39,400 manuscripts from the museum. In all, the museum in downtown Baghdad was believed to have held more than 170,000 items spanning 5,500 years of Mesopotamian civilization. The Baghdad museum has long been recognized as the Middle East's leading archaeological collection. It held millennia-old artwork and fragile clay tablet inscriptions from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, where many of humankind's innovations began. But when U.S. forces — and journalists — first visited the museum after days of looting, they saw hundreds of empty display cases. Iraqi antiquities officials called the theft the "crime of the century," and questioned why American troops hadn't moved quicker to safeguard the collection.
Upon closer inspection, however, American investigators and museum officials found that only 17 cases had been broken into. Thirty-eight items have now been confirmed missing and 22 damaged in the main gallery — far less than originally feared, Bogdanos said. U.S. officials believe organized criminal groups who knew what they were looking for were involved in the looting, Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Interpol meeting Tuesday in Lyon, France. But no one knows the status of tens of thousands more antiquities kept at storage sites across the city, or an untold number of smaller, portable items that museum officials removed for safekeeping months before the war. Every day, people press urgently against the gates to whisper tips about wayward artifacts into the ears of soldiers guarding the collection. Some want money, but others appear interested in safeguarding their heritage. Items returned so far range from an inscribed cornerstone from King Nebuchadnezzar's seventh-century B.C. Babylon palace to trinkets sold at the Baghdad airport gift shop. Others — including a golden harp from the ancient Sumerian city of Ur — were found among the museum debris. The harp was in pieces, Bogdanos said, but can be restored.
The looting of the museum may have grown into an international scandal, but the investigation is in many ways standard, Bogdanos said. "First, you treat this location as a crime scene with the limitations inherent with the crime scene contaminated by a mob," Bogdanos said. "You don't take fingerprints. You establish a timeline. Who came in. Who came out. Who had access. "Second, you do a physical inspection to determine points of entry. Third, you determine what is gone, determine what was here, what's here now and then you do the math." He said it was "clear that there were a combination of groups" among those who raided the museum. "One being a group of individuals who knew what they wanted and selected the items they wanted almost as if from a shopping list," Bogdanos said. "The second group, you're calling them looters, for lack of a better term. Those individuals destroyed as much as they stole and clearly destroyed indiscriminately."
Acting on tips, Bogdanos has tried to retrieve works, so far with little success. Appeals also have gone out to the community to return treasures. A few people have heeded the call, including one man who returned more than 40 items Friday. "People are returning items on a daily basis with no fear of retribution," Bogdanos said, "and no questions asked." Information from The Associated Press and The Washington Post is included in this report.