Tourists visiting Angkor Wat temple on April 8, 2022 in Siem Reap, Cambodia TANG CHHIN Sothy
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The American justice system announced on Friday the restitution to Cambodia of 13 works of art from Khmer culture stolen near the monumental temples of Angkor Wat and which were subject to international trafficking until they were retained by the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the which returned them “voluntarily”.
The federal prosecutor of Manhattan, Damian Williams, head of the most important Prosecutor’s Office in the United States, reported in a press release this restitution of statues and sculptures from the site of the ancient Khmer capital, Koh Ker, 80 km from Angkor, among them a representation of a goddess from the 10th century and a Buddha head from the 7th century.
Williams said that the MET – one of the largest museums on the planet – “voluntarily agreed to return the antiquities” and that “the restitution process is underway.”
American justice had already returned 30 works of Khmer culture to Phnom Penh in August 2022.
“All of the pieces returned today were directly linked to illicit trafficking and, in particular, to a man named Douglas Latchford (died 2020), an art collector and dealer accused (in New York) in 2019 of running a vast network of trafficking of antiquities from Southeast Asia,” he said.
These works and thousands of others were looted at the end of the 20th century during the wars that took place in Cambodia in the 1970s.
According to US justice, thousands of Khmer statues, sculptures and lintels were trafficked internationally for decades from Cambodia to antique dealers in Bangkok, Thailand, before being illegally exported for collectors, businessmen and museums in Asia, Europe and the United States.
In New York State, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has been leading a major restitution campaign since 2017: in the last two years, more than 1,000 pieces worth $225 million have been returned to more than 20 countries, including Cambodia, China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Greece, Turkey and Italy.
New York is a trafficking hub and since 2021-22 several antiquities have been seized from museums, such as the grandiose Met, and from wealthy private collectors in Manhattan.
The Met pledged in May to return more works in its possession that have illegal provenance.
2023-12-15 18:56:25
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