CAIRO: Egyptian police said on Thursday they arrested a museum employee and three alleged accomplices after a priceless ancient gold bracelet was stolen from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, sold for about $4,000 and then melted down.
The 3,000-year-old bracelet, a gold band adorned with lapis lazuli beads, dated back to the reign of Amenemope, a pharaoh of Egypt’s 21st Dynasty (1070-945 BC).
The priceless artefact had been kept under lock and key when it disappeared, a few weeks before it was meant to be exhibited in Italy.
Museum staff reported it missing from a metal safe in the museum’s conservation lab on Saturday, a statement from Egypt’s interior ministry said.
Investigations showed a restoration specialist working at the museum stole the bracelet on September 9 while on duty.
A silver trader in central Cairo helped her facilitate the sale, the police said, first to a gold dealer for 180,000 Egyptian pounds ($3,735), who then sold it to a worker at a gold foundry for 194,000 pounds ($4,025).
The bracelet was then melted down along with other scrap gold, the ministry said.
The suspects were taken into custody and confessed to the crime, according to authorities.
Security camera footage released by Egyptian authorities shows a bracelet being exchanged for a wad of cash in a shop, before the buyer cuts it in two. However, the blurry images suggest the bracelet lacks the distinctive lapis lazuli bead seen in official photos shared a day earlier.
Treasures of the Pharaohs
Egyptian media outlets had earlier reported the loss was discovered during an inventory check ahead of the “Treasures of the Pharaohs” exhibition scheduled in Rome next month.
Under Egyptian law, stealing an antiquity with the intent to smuggle it is punishable by life imprisonment and a fine of 1 to 5 million Egyptian pounds (around $20,000-$100,000), while damaging or defacing antiquities carries up to seven years in prison and a fine of up to 1 million pounds.
Jean Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, an Egyptologist, told AFP the bracelet was discovered in Tanis, in the eastern Nile delta, during archaeological excavations in the tomb of King Psusennes I, where Amenemope had been reburied after the plundering of his original tomb.
“It’s not the most beautiful, but scientifically it’s one of the most interesting” objects, said the expert, who has worked in Tanis.
The bracelet had a fairly simple design, he said, but was made of a gold alloy designed to resist deformation.
To the Ancient Egyptians, the precious metal represented the “flesh of the gods,” while lapus lazuli — imported from what is now Afghanistan — evoked their hair.
Egypt’s cultural institutions have been hit by similar high-profile thefts in the past.
Vincent van Gogh’s “Poppy Flowers,” worth $55 million, was stolen from a Cairo museum in 1977, recovered a decade later, and stolen again in 2010. It remains missing.
Last month, an Egyptian man was sentenced to six months in jail in the United States for smuggling nearly 600 looted artefacts onto the international market.
After Egypt’s 2011 revolution, looters took advantage of the chaos to raid museums and archaeological sites, with thousands of stolen objects later surfacing in private collections worldwide.
The theft from the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, one of the oldest in the country, comes just weeks before the anticipated November 1 opening of Egypt’s new Grand Egyptian Museum, a major cultural project near the Giza Pyramids that has been years in the making.
