Italian police browsing in Brussels shop find stolen Roman statue

AN ANCIENT Roman statue that was stolen from Italy a decade ago was discovered by chance by two off-duty Italian police officers out for an after-dinner stroll in Brussels.

The officers were on an entirely different mission in the Belgian capital when they spotted the 1st century BC headless statue in an antiques shop in the Sablon district, which is known for its relics.

Suspecting that it may have been trafficked, they checked it against a database of stolen art and artefacts.

They found that the marble figure had been stolen in 2011 from Villa Marini Dettina, an archaeological site on the outskirts of Rome.

The large statue is of a Roman man wearing a toga and is worth around €100,000 (£86,000).

The officers are from a unit of the Carabinieri police force that for decades has specialised in tracking down and recovering stolen cultural heritage. “At the end of the day, having finished work and curious to explore the streets of Sablon, the two Carabinieri officers spotted a marble statue in one of the antique shops in the area,” police said.

Once back in Italy, they compared photos they had taken of the statue with a database of stolen items, discovering its history and provenance. The statue was confiscated from the antiques dealer and brought back to Italy.

Police are now investigating an Italian antiques merchant who used a Spanish pseudonym and is suspected of receiving the statue in Italy and then exporting it abroad.

Last month, Carabinieri police unveiled a fragment of mosaic, taken from a huge barge built for the Emperor Caligula 2,000 years ago, that they recovered from an apartment in New York. Police had been tipped off that the brightly-coloured mosaic had been used for decades as a coffee table by a wealthy Manhattan couple.

It was returned to a museum on the shores of Lake Nemi near Rome.