EGYPTIAN DELEGATION IN LONDON TO COMPLETE INVESTIGATIONS INTO
SMUGGLING OF RARE ANTIQUITIES COLLECTION

"This may be the most serious theft of Egyptian antiquities in the
twentieth century". This was the description used by Egyptian Minister
of Culture Farouk Hosni to characterize case no. 391 for 1995 which is
now being completed in London where an Egyptian security-judicial
delegation arrived recently to follow up on developments in this
sensational case. Involved are twenty English witnesses each of whom
obtained one.or more original papyruses smuggled from warehouse number
8 in the Sakkara antiquities zone. Some of those came into possession
of marvelous Pharaonic scenes engraved in rock and taken from the
Hoteb tomb. These make a unique antiquities collection lost to Egypt
that is now trying to return it through Interpol.

Those people charged in connection with this case number eleven
including highly-placed Egyptian antiquities officials and three
Britons: Jonathan Tokley, Mark Leslie and Andrew Man. The latter
confessed that Tokley is the original smuggler of Egyptian
antiquities. Leslie was the middleman in this operation.

Andrew Man is a leading dealer in antiquities and archaeologist who
bought 27 papyruses he knew to be stolen. But his anxiety to ascertain
that they were genuine and not fakes led to his being exposed. In May
1994 he went to the Egyptology department of the British Museum to
have the papyruses checked and it was established that they are really
original but it was also established that they were stolen from the
Sakkara warehouse in Egypt.

For two years a British officer, Charles Ellis, from the department of
international crime at Scotlandyard managed to follow the leads of the
crime to disclose very sensational details. According to the file
reaching the Egyptian Ministry of Justice, the Egyptian defendants
used a privately-owned workshops engaged in imitating original
antiquities to make covers for the original pieces to be smuggled in
order to look faked (non-original). This made it easy to smuggle them
through the Luxor airport which is considered the main gateway for the
smuggling of antiquities because of its proximity to the antiquities
areas in southern Egypt. Security is weak in that airport and there is
a lack of archaeological experts at its customs checkpoints. This is
the same airport from which three Egyptians recently hijacked a plane
and then surrendered to the Libyan authorities.

In the way, members of the gang managed from September 16, 1990, to
July 20, 1991, to saw out large parts of the Hoteb tomb which has been
used to store finds from archaeological sites. They then smuggled them
as fakes to shops selling imitation of Egyptian antiquities in
Britain, Germany and Switzerland. The English gang collected these
pieces to make them a unique collection of Egyptian relics which also
included 182 yellow papyruses each of which is four thousand years old
or even more. It was one of these that the British Museum identified
as original and this led the way to the exposure of the theft of the
rest of the pieces that have been stolen, or their theft fabricated,
by an Egyptian gang led by the owner of an Arab bazaar owner called
Ibrahim Farag.

Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni told Al-Hayat that he has referred
the whole file to the prosecution for investigations. Everyone who had
any connection with this serious case will be suspended in the
performance of his duties. Security organs are now conducting
meticulous checks of the files of archaeologists working in areas of
antiquities to prevent a repetition of this tragedy caused by
Egyptians who smuggled important papers of Egypt's Pharaonic
history. Hosni said that those implicated will be put on trial in
Cairo.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian Minister of Justice, Farouk Saif Al-Nasr,
formed a delegation consisting of councillor Medhat Al-Attar, general
attorney of the Prosecution of Public Funds, Lashin Ibrahim, head of
that prosecution, and a number of police officers from the police
departments of antiquities and public funds to look into the
investigations' files compiled by Scotlandyard.  An official judiciary
source told Al-Hayat that the delegation will ask for impounding of
the seized papyruses and seek an understanding with the British side
to find the rest of the stolen antiquities collections for returning
them to Egypt which notified Interpol of the numbers of the relics and
the papyruses for seizing them in the important auction halls in
London and Paris and with the antiquities dealers in some European
countries.  

Al-Hayat, 2/5/1996