Prosecutors in New York City have announced that they returned to Cambodia and Indonesia 30 antiquities that were looted, sold, or illegally transferred by networks of American antiquities dealers and traffickers.
The antiquities were valued at a total of $3 million, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement on Friday.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced the return of 27 artifacts to Phnom Penh and 3 artifacts to Jakarta.
Among the repatriated items were a bronze statue of the deity Shiva Triad, which had been looted from Cambodia, and a stone bas-relief featuring two royal figures from the Majapahit empire (13th-16th century), which had been stolen from Indonesia.
Art dealers Subhash Kapoor and Nancy Wiener faced accusations related to trafficking antiquities. Kapoor, an Indian American, was arrested in 2011 and subsequently found guilty of stealing 19 ancient idols. He then illegally transferred these artifacts to his art gallery in Manhattan.
As a result, Kapoor received a 13-year prison sentence in India in 2022. Over the years, Kapoor had been selling Hindu, Buddhist, and South Asian antiquities through his gallery, Art of the Past, with some of these items ending up in museum collections.
In 2007, Nancy Wiener attempted to sell the bronze Shiva but instead donated it to the Denver Museum of Art. However, in 2023, New York courts seized the artifact, as reported by the New York Times.
Bragg highlighted the ongoing efforts to combat antiquities trafficking, emphasizing that they are continuing to investigate the extensive networks involved in targeting Southeast Asian antiquities. He acknowledged that there is still much work to be done.
Guided by his leadership, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit has successfully retrieved almost 1,200 artifacts, with a total estimated value exceeding $250 million.
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