A ceremony was held at the Egyptian Embassy in Paris, on the sidelines of an official visit by the Egyptian Attorney General and a delegation from his cabinet, to discuss aspects of international judicial cooperation between the two countries.
The cooperation includes, in particular, joint investigations into a series of transnational organized crimes committed by an international, organized and multinational group that loots and smuggles Egyptian and other antiquities across Africa, Europe and the United States. Asia, and traded them around the world over the years, using elaborate methods of smuggling and falsifying antique ownership documents.
Exciting details
In 2001, the mission of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, led by the Franco-Egyptian archaeologist Vasily Dobriev, discovered a “cemetery” more than 4,200 years old on the site of “Tabbat al-Jaish” in the south of Saqqara in Giza Governorate. It includes the tombs of the most prominent priests of the ancient Egyptian state, including “Haw Nefer”, one of the nobles in the royal palace of King Pepi I, the third king of the Sixth Dynasty. After a stoppage of several months at the end of the excavation campaign, then a resumption of work in October 2002, the loss of decorative panels from the facade of the above-mentioned priest’s hut was discovered by the mission about its work. About 10 years later, the French scientist, head of the mission, during his visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, saw the exhibition of 3 pieces of stone from the cemetery’s disappeared, all of which bore an engraved representation of the priest “Comment Nefer”, and he also saw, at a close time, the sale of other similar stones in an auction house in the French capital. The following year, he saw another group also offered for sale in the same room, so he informed the Egyptian public prosecutor’s office and the French investigation authorities of the incident, so that they carry out investigation procedures there. parallel surveys. The investigation revealed that one of the defendants is an antique dealer and director of one of the famous exhibitions in Paris, and that he had previously worked as an expert in this field for several customs agencies, and that he succeeded in smuggled all the parts and claimed, contrary to the truth, that he bought them from a person in Switzerland, who in turn bought them from a French woman in the 70s. The investigations confirmed that “her statements were false, as the sales document bearing the signature of the said woman was proven to be a forgery, as it was discovered by comparing it to her real signature on a will that she has left to one of his relatives that he was a fake signature.” In the light of these investigation results, the French investigation authorities placed the accused in detention and seized a certain amount of information, data and documents against him for the purpose of his trial. Within the framework of international judicial cooperation between Egypt and France, the Egyptian embassy in France received a summons from the Paris court to attend the hearings of the case after having sent the accused to trial, so that samples of the aforementioned false documents were found on his computer, and his statement before the court of his relationship with one of the defendants in the international case in which he is accused director of the Louvre museum, and that this ci had previously purchased the two looted coins. In October 2022, the court ruled that Egypt was the owner of the looted antiquities, convicting the accused and forcing him to pay a fine and financial compensation in Cairo, along with his right to recover the two pieces.
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