UNITED KINGDOM: Approximately 2,000 treasures, including gold jewellery and diamonds, had been taken over a lengthy period of time from the British Museum, but recovery attempts had already begun, according to the museum’s head, George Osborne, on Saturday.
The British Museum, a highly popular attraction in London renowned for housing treasures like the Rosetta Stone—an ancient Egyptian artefact with inscriptions in hieroglyphs and other languages—had last week said that an employee had been fired for the theft of items spanning from the 15th century BC to the 19th century AD from a storage area.
Hartwig Fischer, the director of the museum, said on Friday that he would resign after acknowledging shortcomings in the investigation into the theft of objects from the collection.
Former British finance minister Osborne told the UK media that not all of the museum’s collection was correctly registered or categorised, a problem that is common among big organisations with collections that have been gathered over many decades.
A “forensic” investigation is underway to determine the stolen items, according to Osborne. “We think it’s around 2,000 items. But I have to say that’s a very provisional figure, and we’re still actively looking,” he said.
“We’ve already started to recover some of the stolen items,” he further added, without providing any other details regarding what had been recovered and how.
Osborne stated that although the museum had earlier disregarded a warning that the thefts were occurring in 2021, he did not think there had been any willful cover-up.
However, he suggested that there may have been some “potential group think” at the institution’s top that made it difficult to accept that an insider was stealing.
He said that the thefts had “certainly been damaging” to the museum’s image as a dependable keeper of rare objects from other cultures.
“That’s why I’m apologising on behalf of the museum,” he stated.
Police reported on Thursday that they had spoken with a man about the stolen items but had not yet charged him.
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