New York prosecutors seized five Egyptian antiques from the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an international trafficking investigation involving the former head of Paris's Louvre Museum.
The Manhattan district attorney's office stated that the Egyptian artifacts included a group of painted linen fragments, noting that they were worth more than $3 million. It added that they dated between 250 and 450 BC, depicting a scene from the Book of Exodus.
"The pieces were seized pursuant to the warrant," a spokesperson for the district attorney told AFP on Thursday.
He added that they are "related" to the investigation in Paris in which Jean-Luc Martinez, who ran the Louvre from 2013 to 2021, was charged last week with complicity in fraud and "concealing the origin of criminally obtained works by false endorsement."
Last week, the Louvre witnessed a strange incident when a man masquerading as a wheelchair-bound elderly granny threw a piece of cake at the Mona Lisa painting in a climate-related protest.
The world’s best-known painting was undamaged thanks to its thick glass protective case. The incident, which took place about lunchtime in Paris on Sunday (Central European Time) was captured on camera by several visitors among the hundreds queuing up to get a glimpse of what the French call “la Joconde”.
The man was pushed to the front of the queue in a wheelchair, then “jumped up” and hurled the slice of cake at the painting, which could be seen smeared in white icing.
In the video, he was saying in French: “Think about the Earth. There are people destroying the Earth. That’s why I did it. Think about the planet.”
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