Egypt says stolen pharoah’s bracelet melted down, sold for US$4,000

A hawk-shaped gold breastplate and bracelets, part of the funerary objects of King Amenemope are seen in this undated photo. (Photo By DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/De Agostini via Getty Images)

Egyptian police said on Thursday they arrested a museum employee and three alleged accomplices after a priceless ancient gold bracelet was stolen from Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, sold for about $4,000 and then melted down.

The 3,000-year-old bracelet, a gold band adorned with lapis lazuli beads, dated back to the reign of Amenemope, a pharaoh of Egypt’s 21st Dynasty (1070-945 BC).

It was reported missing on Saturday by museum staff, a statement from Egypt’s interior ministry said, adding that it had been kept in a locked metal safe inside the museum’s conservation lab.

It said a restoration specialist working at the museum stole the bracelet on September 9 while on duty.

A silver trader in central Cairo helped facilitate the sale, the police said, first to a gold dealer for 180,000 Egyptian pounds (US$3,735), who then sold it to a worker at a gold foundry for 194,000 pounds ($4,025).

The bracelet was then melted down along with other scrap gold, the ministry said.

The suspects were taken into custody and confessed to the crime, according to authorities.

Security camera footage shared by the Egyptian interior ministry appeared to show a man handing over a sum of money before cutting a gold bracelet in two. It was not clear whether the bracelet shown is the same ancient piece stolen from the museum.

Egyptian media outlets had earlier reported the loss was discovered during an inventory check ahead of the “Treasures of the Pharaohs” exhibition scheduled in Rome next month.

Jean Guillaume Olette-Pelletier, an Egyptologist, told AFP the bracelet was discovered in Tanis, in the eastern Nile delta, during archeological excavations in the tomb of King Psusennes I, where Amenemope had been reburied after the plundering of his original tomb.

Egypt’s cultural institutions have been hit by similar high-profile thefts in the past.

Vincent van Gogh’s “Poppy Flowers”, worth $55 million, was stolen from a Cairo museum in 1977, recovered a decade later, and stolen again in 2010. It remains missing.

This month, an Egyptian man was sentenced to six months in jail in the United States for smuggling hundreds of looted artefacts onto the international market.

After Egypt’s 2011 revolution, looters took advantage of the chaos to raid museums and archeological sites, with thousands of stolen objects later surfacing in private collections worldwide.