AFGHANISTAN, April 19, 2021 (Up News Info): For half a century, through war, anarchy and upheaval, Afghanistan has been stripped of tens of thousands of Buddhist and Hindu antiquities, some dating back more than 1,800 years. Many of those items entered the Western market in the 1990s and early 2000s, St John Simpson, a curator at the British Museum, told The New York Times last month. “And all of those,” he said, “were almost certainly illegally exported or stolen.” On Monday, 33 of those antiquities, valued at $1.8 million, were handed over to the Afghan ambassador, Roya Rahmani (pictured), by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the Department of Homeland Security, at a ceremony in New York.
The artifacts were part of a hoard of 2,500 objects valued at $143 million seized in a dozen raids between 2012 and 2014 from Subhash Kapoor, a disgraced Manhattan art dealer currently jailed in India on smuggling and theft charges. Upon receiving the items, many of them delicate heads made from stucco, clay and a soft stone known as schist, a grateful Ms. Rahmani nonetheless warned that “the environment that allows for the plundering of Afghanistan’s treasured antiquities is the same environment that allows for the perpetuation of conflict.”
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