US returns looted antiquities worth $10 million to India

The United States has returned more than 1,400 looted artifacts worth $10 million to India as part of an ongoing initiative to repatriate stolen art from countries across South and Southeast Asia, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office announced Wednesday.

The trafficked goods recovered include items that, until recently, were on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among them is a sandstone sculpture of a celestial dancer that was smuggled from central India to London, before being illegally sold to one of the Met’s patrons and donated to the museum.

The repatriations resulted from “several ongoing investigations” into looting networks, including those operated by convicted art traffickers Nancy Wiener and Subhash Kapoor, an American antiquities dealer who was sentenced to 10 years in jail for running a multimillion-dollar looting network through his New York gallery, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said in press release.

The Tanesar Mother Goddess statue was looted from a village in Rajasthan, India in the 1960s before eventually ending up on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Kapoor was sent to face charges in India’s Tamil Nadu state following his arrest in Germany in 2011. The DA’s office obtained an arrest warrant for him in 2012though he remains in custody in India, pending his extradition to the US.

Museum staff members prepare an artifact returned from U.S to Cambodia, before an official ceremony at the Cambodian National Museum in Phnom Penh Cambodia, Thursday, July 4, 2024. Cambodia on Thursday officially organized a welcome ceremony for the arrival of more than a dozen rare Angkor era sculptures from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that were tied to an art dealer and collector accused of running a huge antiquities trafficking network out of Southeast Asia. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)

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“Today’s repatriation marks another victory in what has been a multiyear international investigation into antiquities trafficked by one of history’s most prolific offenders,” William Walker, the federal Homeland Security Investigation’s New York special agent in charge, said in a press statement.

The items were formally returned at a ceremony at the Indian consulate in New York Wednesday.

Since its creation over a decade ago, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit –– a task force of lawyers, investigators and art experts –– has recovered 5,800 antiquities valued at almost $460 million. The unit has also convicted 16 people of trafficking offenses and filed for the extradition of six others linked to stolen cultural property.

In July, the US and India signed an agreement to protect cultural property by preventing illegal trades and streamlining the process of returning stolen antiquities back to India.