New York prosecutors announced on Friday ( Apr 26 ) that they had returned 30 antiquities to Cambodia and Indonesia that had been illegally transferred by networks of American dealers and traffickers.
According to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the artifacts were worth a total of US$ 3 million.
In two recent repatriation ceremonies, Bragg announced in a statement that he had returned 27 pieces to Phnom Penh and three to Jakarta, including a bronze of the Hindu deity Shiva (” Shiva Triad” ) looted from Cambodia and a stone bas-relief of two royal figures from the Majapahit empire ( 13th to 16th centuries ) stolen from Indonesia.
Bragg accused craft sellers Subhash Kapoor, an American- American, and American Nancy Wiener in the illegal prostitution of the antiquities.
Kapoor has been the subject of a US justice research dubbed” Hidden Idol” for more than ten years and is accused of operating a system that traffics goods stolen from Southeast Asia for sale in his Manhattan museum.
Arrested in 2011 in Germany, Kapoor was sent up to India where he was tried and sentenced in November 2022 to 13 years in prison.
Kapoor refuted the accusations in a US prosecution involving a conspiracy to customers in stolen works of art.
” We are continuing to investigate the large- ranging smuggling network that… target South Asian antiquities”, Bragg said in the speech.
” There is obviously however a lot more work to be done.”