Cairo (AFP)
Egypt announced that it had recovered on Wednesday, after years of negotiations, around 5,000 ancient coins from the United States, where they had been fraudulently sent.
In a statement, the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities reported "the arrival at Cairo airport of a large quantity of ancient Egyptian pieces which were in the possession of the Museum of the Bible in Washington".
According to the manager in charge of the returned items file, Chaabane Abdeljawad, quoted in the press release, these are nearly 5,000 antiquities, mainly manuscripts, but also funeral masks, parts of coffins and heads of stone statues. .
These pieces, which were fraudulently taken out of Egypt, will be stored at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, the text added.
It was not immediately clear how and by whom these pieces were illegally removed from Egypt and how they arrived at the Museum of the Bible in Washington.
But the Egyptian authorities have been negotiating with this museum for years to recover them.
During the popular revolt of 2011 which ousted Hosni Mubarak from power, many pieces of the inestimable Egyptian heritage were damaged, destroyed or stolen and then left illegally.
Thousands of works subsequently resurfaced on the international market, on websites or at auctions.
© 2021 AFP