From the past
Looted art returned A priceless collection of ancient Roman and other artefacts has been returned to Italy after an investigation into stolen or looted treasures being sold to universities, museums and private collectors in the US. The hoard included three fragments of firstcentury AD frescoes from Pompeii, which were stolen in 1957, as well as ancient Greek kraters, or vases, Etruscan pots, and bronze figurines. A special cultural heritage unit of the paramilitary Carabinieri police said three other frescoes had been stolen at the same time but had since been recovered — one from Britain in 2008, another from the US in 2009 and the third from Switzerland in 2000. Some of the 25 items had been put up for sale by the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s after traffickers lied about their provenance, claiming they had been exported legally. Others were bought in good faith by museums and collectors in the US, who turned them over voluntarily to the Italian authorities after being told they had been illegally exported. floor to kneel by a wall facing the crowd, then each man was shot in the head individually before being sprayed with bullets fired from an AK47,” the report said. Africa Gunmen tried to assassinate Libya’s internationally recognised Prime Minister on his way to the airport in They included Etruscan vases from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, as well as 17th-century botany books from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and a 16th-century manuscript from Turin that was the eastern city of Tobruk, a spokesman for his Government said. Arish Said, head of the Government’s media department, said that Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni’s motorcade was attacked and one of his guards was lightly wounded but that there were no fatalities. “They managed to escape,” Said said. Before the attack, he said armed men who stolen in 1990 and ended up at the University of South Florida. The 1800-year-old lid of a Roman sarcophagus, depicting Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, King of Crete, was seized by US police in New York after being smuggled out of Italy. had been protesting outside a session of the Tobruk Government’s House of Representatives tried to storm the building, firing shots into the air and demanding al-Thinni be removed from office. They were “threatening to kill the Prime Minister and force the House to sack him,” Said said. He identified the men as being funded by “corrupted political financiers”