The FBI is investigating the sale of hundreds of ancient artifacts from the British Museum to American buyers.
As the BBC reports, the FBI contributed to the return of 268 objects, which had been sold to a collector in Washington and which the museum claims belong to it.
The British museum had announced last year that ancient gems, jewelry and other items from its collection had been lost, stolen or destroyed.
British Museum’s Lost Treasures Selling on eBay…
A New Orleans-based buyer told the UK network that he received an email from an FBI agent asking for information regarding two items he had purchased on eBay and informing him that he was assisting London’s Metropolitan Police in their investigation into the disappearance or theft of items from British museum.
The buyer stated that he no longer owns either piece of jewelry.
Stolen item recoveries and investigations
The British Museum says it has so far recovered 626 items out of the 1,500 it estimates were stolen or missing.
The British Museum says that of the 1,500 items it estimates have been stolen or are missing, 626 have so far been recovered and another 100 have been located but have not yet been returned. The vast majority of the lost items were unaccounted for and the British Museum is still looking for ways to prove they came from its collection. In some cases, this involves collectors agreeing to donate items to the museum for staff to assess.
Accusations once morest the curator of the ancient Greek collection of the British Museum
The British Museum accuses Peter Higgs, curator of the ancient Greek collection and acting head of the Ancient Greece and Rome department, of stealing, destroying, melting down and selling ancient artefacts and pocketing an estimated £100,000 from the sales, charges he denies. .
According to court documents from the British Museum’s civil suit once morest him, Higgs is believed to have been stealing items for at least a decade, mostly selling unrecorded items from the museum’s warehouses.
The British Museum believes Higgs, who has since been fired, had sold items to at least 45 buyers on eBay.
Evidence once morest the main suspect
Three buyers said, according to the BBC, that the seller “sultan1966″ introduced himself as “Paul Higgins” or “Paul” on eBay or through emails he exchanged with them.
According to court documents, the British Museum says Higgs admitted that the account sultan1966 belonged to him.
The New Orleans buyer, Tony Birbiglia, told the UK network that he had bought two items from “sultan1966”: one was an amethyst gem depicting Eros riding a dolphin, which he bought for £42 on May 2016 and the other was an orange scarab-shaped gem, which he bought for £170.
Birbilia sent his payment for the item in question to a PayPal account registered to Higgs’ personal email address.
The British Museum has not yet examined these objects, so it has not yet established whether they are from its collection.
However, according to iefimerida, it appears that the US is not the only place where items missing from the British Museum have ended up.
Danish antiquities dealer Itai Grandel, who first alerted the museum to the thefts, identified items sold to buyers in cities as diverse as Hamburg, Cologne, Paris and Hong Kong.
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