Looted items appear in museums

Almost 100 items of Syrian art and antiquities looted by the extremist Daesh have been smuggled into Britain and sold for money to fund the group’s activities, art crime experts and archeologists have warned, according to the British press.

The items, allegedly being sold in London, include looted gold and silver Byzantine coins as well as Roman pottery and glass worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The London paper compared the phenomenon to Africa’s “blood diamond” industry, in which the money raised by the sale of precious African diamonds financed wars and conflicts across the continent.

“I get approached all the time about looted artefacts, whether it’s directly from someone who’s trying to sell it or images that were sent to somebody who has offered to buy it,” Christopher Marinello, director of Art Recovery International, told the . His group specialises in the identification and recovery of stolen and disputed art and artefacts.

Marinello said one item alone could be worth tens of thousands of dollars, but the more valuable and unique the item, the more scrutiny there will be, and so collectors tended to shy away from more valuable items. The newspaper also quoted Michael Danti, an archeologist with the Syrian Heritage Initiative, as saying that Daesh was known to be involved.