This Friday, Spain delivered to Libya a dozen valuable archaeological pieces seized by the National Police in 2018 and coming from looting that ISIS carried out in museums and sites in Apollonia and Cyrene, in the Libyan region of Cyrenaica, to sell them and thus finance the terrorist activities of the Islamic State.
These are eight mosaics and several heads and torsos of Roman and Greek sculptures that were stolen by jihadists in 2014 in Libya and that were recovered four years later in Barcelona by the Historical Heritage Brigade of the Specialized and Violent Crime Unit (UDEV) of the National Police. The pieces, all of them of great historical value, were until now in custody at the National Archaeological Museum and at the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain (IPCE) waiting for archaeologists to certify their origin to be returned to their legitimate owners. , which occurred this Friday in an official event in which the Libyan ambassador in Spain, his Spanish counterpart in Libya, as well as senior diplomatic representatives from several Arab countries participated.
While waiting for the case to be judged (the investigation, led by the judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón, has not yet concluded), the recovered pieces will remain provisionally deposited in the Libyan embassy. Once the oral hearing of the trial takes place and the sentence is handed down, the antiquities will return to their places of origin.
First operation in the world
The recovery of the mosaics and sculptures is the result of the first police operation in the world against the trade in pieces looted by jihadists. It is also the largest number of pieces returned by a country to its rightful owner to date. The Police named the operation after Harmakis, an Egyptian deity.
According to the lawyer of the Libyan embassy in Spain, Emilio Ramírez, before being violently looted by Islamist terrorists, several of these pieces remained hidden, precisely to prevent their theft by jihadists, who in 2014 already occupied large areas of Libya. “The director of one of the museums where they were located hid them so that they would not fall into the hands of the Islamic State, but the terrorists forced him to dig them up.”
ISIS (also called Daesh) traded stolen antiquities on the black market to finance its terrorist attacks around the world, especially in Arab countries. The pieces reached an art gallery in Barcelona, where they were seized by the Police, who arrested two people involved, experts in ancient art, who led a network dedicated to the illicit purchase of pieces from archaeological sites looted in Libya. The detainees are accused of participation in a crime of financing terrorism, membership in a criminal organization, reception, smuggling and document falsification. Hence the case is heard in the National Court.
Most of the pieces belong to the Libyan region of Cyrenaica, which has important Greco-Roman sites and is an area that was under Daesh control from 2011 to 2016.
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