US Returns Over 1,400 Looted Artefacts Worth $10 Million To India

As part of an ongoing initiative to repatriate stolen art from countries across South and Southeast Asia, the United States on Wednesday announced that it has returned more than 1,400 looted artefacts worth $10 million to India. According to CNN, the recovered trafficked goods include items that were recently 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. 

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

After his arrest in Germany in 2011, Subhash Kapoor was sent to face charges in Tamil Nadu. The US Da's office obtained an arrest warrant for him in 2012, however, he remains in custody in India, pending his extradition to the US.

"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, per CNN. 

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

Notably, 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.

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The US returned 297 stolen antiquities to India in September. The antiquities belong to a time period spanning almost 4000 years, from 2000 BCE - 1900 CE and have origins in different parts of India. The majority of the antiquities were terracotta artefacts from Eastern India, while others were made in stone, metal, wood and ivory and belong to different parts of the country. 

"In recent times, restitution of cultural property has become an important aspect of India-US cultural understanding and exchange. Since 2016, the US Government has facilitated the return of a large number of trafficked or stolen antiquities. 10 antiquities were returned during PM's visit to USA in June 2016; 157 antiquities during his visit in September 2021 and a further 105 antiquities during his visit in June last year," the Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement in September.

"The total number of cultural artefacts returned from US to India since 2016 stands at 578. This is the maximum number of cultural artefacts returned by any country to India," it added.