Round 2,000 objects are believed to have disappeared from the storages, the chair of the board of trustees has revealed
Round 2,000 historic artifacts, considered value tens of hundreds of thousands of kilos, have been stolen from the British Museum’s vault, in response to an estimate by George Osborne, the chair of the establishment’s board of trustees.
The London-based establishment revealed earlier this month {that a} assortment of jewellery gems relationship from the fifteenth century BC to the 1800s disappeared from the storages, the place they have been stored for educational and analysis functions.
“I provides you with an estimate of round 2,000. However I’ve to say that’s a really provisional determine,” Osborne informed the BBC on Saturday. He added that, though some objects had been recovered, it was “a silver lining to a darkish cloud.”
Osborne acknowledged that the popularity of the museum, which holds treasures resembling iconic marble sculptures from the Greek Parthenon, has been broken. He argued, nevertheless, that the stolen objects have been “small objects of jewellery, gems and bits of gold,” somewhat than “the unimaginable objects that we now have on show in public.” He added that the museum has taken steps to enhance safety, whereas the employees was specializing in “cleansing up the mess” and cataloging the lacking artifacts.
On Friday, museum’s director Hartwig Firscher resigned from his submit, admitting that satisfactory measures had not been taken to stop the theft.
The custodians have been first alerted in February 2021, when vintage vendor Ittai Gradel despatched a discover that the objects from a set donated to the museum in 1814 have been posted on the market on Ebay. The claims have been dismissed on the time as “an outright lie,” with Fischer later saying that “our investigation concluded that these objects have been all accounted for.”
Former curators have criticized the British Museum for not protecting correct catalogs and “extremely poor”
In mild of the theft, Greece renewed calls to return the Parthenon marbles that have been faraway from Athens within the nineteenth century, arguing that the British Museum can now not say that “Greek cultural heritage is extra protected” there than in Greece. Britain, nevertheless, refused to return the sculptures, citing authorized hurdles.
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