The well-known antiquities collector and dealer Georges Lotfi is suspected of being involved in the smuggling of stolen art on a large scale.
An arrest warrant has been issued in New York for the Lebanese man who had helped the authorities track down looted art for years.
Lotfi, who lives in Tripoli, is said to have kept looted art in his apartments in New York, Dubai and Paris and in a warehouse in New Jersey, which had been smuggled from war-torn Libya and Syria, among other places.
In 2019, the 81-year-old gave the police a tip that led to the confiscation of a gilded sarcophagus in the Metropolitan Museum and its return to Egypt.
Lotfi dismissed the allegations as baseless to the New York Times.
The businessman is said to have since admitted that he was also the first owner of a marble bull's head that police confiscated from the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 2017.
The sculpture dates from the 4th century BC and is said to have been stolen from a Lebanese excavation site during the civil war in 1981. It later appeared in the British art trade and, according to media reports, was acquired by the American collector couple Lynda and William Beierwaltes.
In 2010, the Beierwaltes sold the work to Michael H. Steinhardt - the notorious collector who, after a year-long lawsuit, is now banned from the antique art trade for the rest of his life for illegal activities.
In 2010, Steinhardt lent the Bull's Head to the Met,