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Peter John Higgs, a distinguished curator who was employed on the British Museum for 30 years, has been recognized because the individual alleged to be accountable for stealing priceless artefacts from the museum’s assortment, The Each day Telegraph newspaper experiences.
Higgs is suspected to have operated for years with out detection and to have spirited away uncategorised gadgets from the museum’s assortment earlier than promoting them on the e-commerce website eBay. The report in The Each day Telegraph newspaper states that gadgets from the museum’s assortment first appeared on eBay as early as 2016.
Higgs largely took small gadgets of gold jewelry, in addition to valuable gems, from the gathering, a few of which date again to Historical Rome. The objects in query are considered value tens of hundreds of thousands of kilos.
The museum yesterday introduced an impartial overview into why Higgs was in a position to take away gadgets from the gathering with out detection; the overview is bound to ask tough questions on what seems to be an enormous safety breach. Senior figures from the UK’s museum sector are right now asking if the British Museum can nonetheless be thought-about a accountable custodian of its assortment, which incorporates many gadgets of contested provenance.
The legislation agency Artwork Restoration Worldwide, which specialises in restitution points, posted on X, previously generally known as Twitter: “Maybe the Parthenon Marbles should not secure within the UK in spite of everything”.
Higgs was first employed by the museum in 1993 and labored in a senior curatorial place because the museum’s head of division for Greece and Rome. He is called one of many museum’s so-called ”monuments males”, and was the lead curator of the exhibition Historical Greeks: athletes, warriors and heroes, which was staged on the museum in 2021 and is at the moment on tour.
The Each day Telegraph report states that an unnamed antiquities knowledgeable knowledgeable the museum of the illicit exercise three years in the past, however the museum solely acted in dismissing Higgs earlier this 12 months. It’s now taking the choice to go public with the information, which comes shortly after the announcement that director Hartwig Fischer is leaving his submit on the museum early subsequent 12 months.
Higgs was recognized because the alleged thief when he started to promote gadgets that, not like earlier items, had been comprehensively catalogued by the museum and will thus be traced again to its digital stock. Though he operated underneath a pseudonym on eBay, a portal on his Paypal account linked to his Twitter feed, on which he used his actual identify.
On the British Museum’s web site, Higgs is photographed with a 2,000-year-old Libyan statue, which was within the strategy of being returned to its nation of origin after being trafficked by way of Europe.
Within the Telegraph report, Higgs’s household mentioned he’s harmless of all wrongdoing and have vowed to clear his identify. No arrests have but been made, though the British Museum has dedicated to pursue authorized motion within the occasion of an arrest.
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