Bactrian treasure: the mystery deepens

Unlocking the riddle of the missing Bactrian gold seemed a rare stroke of good fortune in a country that has known nothing but war and destruction for the past 24 years. . .

However, the treasure hunt has now turned into a mystery as clouded as the origins of the Bactrian kingdom.

“It was like something out of a movie,” President Hamid Karzai said last week in an interview with The Sunday Times. “We had to go down three elevators under the palace and along a tunnel set with booby traps, then through a door with seven or eight codes all held by different people.”

Installed by a German company during the reign of King Nadir Shah in the 1930s, the vault’s steel door had not been opened in 14 years. As the codes were entered and the door swung open, Karzai and the ministers accompanying him held their breath.

For one thing, they hoped to discover the central bank’s gold reserves, which the Taliban had tried to steal before fleeing on the eve of the fall of Kabul two years ago. The Taliban had been unable to crack the code after almost beating to death a bank employee who refused to reveal it.

Karzai’s party also wanted to see the collection of 20,000 gold artefacts from the ancient Bactrian kingdom which were excavated by Russian archeologists in burial mounds in northern Afghanistan in 1978. . .

However, although they said they entered the vault and discovered $90m in bullion bars belonging to the central bank, nobody could find the key to a room believed to hold the Bactrian gold.

“It may be there or it may not be there,” said Dr Sayed Raheen, minister of culture and information. “All we saw was the locked door. I don’t want to blast open the lock in case we cannot lock it again.”

UPDATE: And an account of how the Taliban were prevented from running off with the gold reserves (and kept ignorant of the Bactrian hoard), from the Telegraph.

Posted by David on October 25, 2003 10:34 PM