Hun Sen thanks Biden for return of looted statues
PRIME Minister Hun Sen thanked US President Joe Biden for his country’s efforts to return looted Khmer antiquities to Cambodia.
More than 30 artefacts are lined up for repatriation to the kingdom by the end of the year.
Hun Sen met with Biden on Saturday as Biden attended the Asean-us summit.
“Prime Minister Hun Sen thanked the US for returning looted artefacts to Cambodia. He said the US is the ‘number one’ country in helping repatriate looted antiquities,” read a post on the Prime Minister’s official social media.
Earlier this month, the United States returned a pre-angkorian-style sandstone statue of the four-armed deity Narayana, or one of the forms of Vishnu in a ceremony at the Cambodian embassy in the United States.
Huot Samnang, director of the Archeological Department of the General Department of Heritage at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, told The Post: “Currently we are preparing documents to repatriate this statue to Cambodia. It will be returned later this year or at the beginning of next year, along with about 30 other statues that the US government returned to us a few months ago.”
Pieces of the four-armed Narayana body were stolen from a temple in eastern Cambodia in the early 1990s at the direction of Doris Wiener, a well-known antiquities dealer, according to a press release issued by the Manhattan District Attorney of New York.
It said the pieces of the statue were assembled by Wiener and other accomplices and eventually smuggled into Manhattan in 1995, via Thailand.
After the statue arrived in Manhattan, Wiener sold it to a private collector.