Posted on 04/19/2003 7:32:24 PM PDT by Indy Pendance
MOST works of art stolen from Iraqi museums by looters will resurface on the world art market, a German expert has said.
"That is what happened after the first Gulf War," Ulli Seegers, from the Art Loss Register (ALR), which manages the world's largest database of stolen artwork, told the DPA news agency.
"The museums would not have been ransacked if there were not an international market for the works," she said.
The ALR is expecting to receive a detailed list of stolen works, in order to trace them on the art market.
"Whether in fairs or auctions, we watch everything," Seegers said, adding: "It is often years before a stolen work reappears."
The ALR was founded in 1991 by a group of major auction houses and insurers and has a 25 per cent success rate in tracking down stolen works, according to Seegers.
Experts and dealers in the United States warn however that the Iraqi treasures are unlikely to find honest buyers on the ancient art market and are more likely to be sold on the black market.
Following the collapse of the regime in Baghdad, looters made off with some 170,000 items of antiquity, dating back thousands of years, from the Iraqi capital's main museum.
Another museum in Mosul, in northern Iraq, has also been stripped and its Islamic library, housing one of the oldest surviving copies of the Koran, ravaged by fire.
Iraq, known in ancient times as Mesopotamia, is considered the "cradle of civilisation", with thousands of archaeological sites dating back up to 10,000 years.
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