Baghdad loot hits the world art markets, continued

Customs agents at a US airport believe they have seized at least one item taken from the Baghdad museum, which was looted of thousands of valuable artefacts as Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed.

The FBI refused to say at which airport the object had been confiscated or the nature of the artefact, but customs officials across the country have been put on high alert amid suspicions that many of the stolen objects will end up on the US market.

Many objects from Iraq, looted both at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 and during the last, have already started turning up for sale at online auctioneers, experts say.

"You won't find the big, expensive pieces on the internet, but the smaller things that won't command as much attention," Dr Neil Brodie of the UK's Illicit Antiquities Research Centre told BBC News Online. "It's these pieces that are much harder to track down."

Posted by David on April 22, 2003 1:09 PM