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\n\tOn April 28, Manhattan District Attorney\u00a0Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced the return of 657 trafficked antiquities to the people of India. The items, valued at nearly $14 million, were recovered in the course of ongoing investigations by the D.A.\u2019s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Homeland Security Investigations.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe items were formally returned at a ceremony in New York, which was attended by representatives from the D.A.\u2019s office and the Consulate General of India. \u201cThe scale of the trafficking networks that targeted cultural heritage in India is massive, as demonstrated by the return of more than 600 pieces today,\u201d said District Attorney Bragg. \u201cThere is unfortunately more work to be done to return stolen artifacts back to India, and I thank our team for their persistent efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAmong the recovered pieces is a bronze figure of the Buddhist deity Avalokiteshvara, valued at $2 million. One of a trove of 7th\u20138th century bronzes found in 1939 at the Sirpur archeological site in India, it later entered the collection of the Mahant Ghasidas Memorial Museum in Raipur. By 1982 it had been stolen from the museum and smuggled into the United States; it ultimately ended up in a private collection in New York, from which it was seized in 2025 by the D.A.\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
\n\tAlso returned was a red sandstone figure of a standing Buddha from northern India, valued at $7.5 million. This statue was smuggled into New York by Subhash Kapoor, a former Manhattan-based art dealer convicted in 2022 in India for running a decades-long antiquities trafficking operation; he is currently awaiting extradition to the U.S. The piece was recovered by the District Attorney\u2019s Antiquities Trafficking Unit from one of Kapoor\u2019s New York storage units.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe repatriation also included a sandstone sculpture of a dancing Ganesha, the Hindu elephant-headed god, which was looted by convicted trafficker Vaman Ghiya and shipped to New York-based gallery owner Doris Wiener. After Wiener\u2019s death, her daughter Nancy\u2014later convicted by the D.A.\u2019s office of antiquities trafficking\u2014created a false provenance for the piece and sold it in 2012 through Christie\u2019s auction house. The person who purchased it surrendered it to the D.A. earlier this year.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Antiquities Trafficking Unit has been investigating Kapoor and his associates\u2019 looting, exportation, and sale of Southeast and South Asian artifacts for over a decade. In 2012, it obtained an arrest warrant for Kapoor, and in 2019, it secured the convictions of five of his co-conspirators.<\/p>\n
\n\tTo date, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit has recovered more than 6,200 cultural treasures, including rare books, works of art, and antiquities, valued at more than $485 million, and returned more than 5,900 of those to 36 countries.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ganesha.jpg?w=1024″] On April 28, Manhattan District Attorney\u00a0Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced the return of 657 trafficked antiquities to the people of India. The items, valued at nearly $14 million, were recovered in the course of ongoing investigations by the D.A.\u2019s Antiquities Trafficking Unit and Homeland Security Investigations. The items were formally returned at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1923880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1923880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1923880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1923880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1923880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1923880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}