MORE ON THE STOLEN LIBYAN COIN HOARD

The treasure was kept mostly in two wooden chests, and locked away in a bank vault: thousands of coins, jewelry and figurines, some around 2,600 years old. For decades it sat in the bank, unattended despite the historical and monetary value. Then, as a popular uprising erupted around the downtown bank last winter, someone entered the vault and made off with the trove.

Now, as Interpol searches for the collection on the illegal antiquities markets, questions are still being raised about the nature of the theft. One thing most seem to agree on: The heist was an inside job.

“I cannot say who did it,” said Ahmed Buzaian, an archaeology professor at Benghazi University, who was part of an outside group that investigated the crime scene. “But they knew exactly what was inside.”

What happened, according to the official story, strikes of Harry Houdini meets Ocean’s Eleven. At some point in late March — only a month after rebels in Benghazi had evicted the forces of Col. Muammar Qaddafi and not long after NATO began airstrikes in support of the rebels — a group of thieves broke into the National Commercial Bank of Benghazi, likely from the adjacent building that housed the secret police and that protesters torched at the beginning of the revolution.

Once inside the bank lobby, said Osama El-Ketaf, head of the bank’s legal office, they drilled directly into the vault through a little more than two feet of steel-reinforced concrete. The hole, he said, was big enough for a very skinny adult or a child. In the vault were a series of safes and chests, and power tools were used to tear the containers apart. Inside were nearly 8,000 gold, silver and bronze coins — along with maybe 300 rings, necklaces, bracelets and medallions and another 40 or so bronze and ivory figurines. All of them were unearthed over the first half of the last century in five Greco-Roman cities in northeastern Libya. Taken during the Italian retreat of its former colony in World War II, the trove was returned in 1961, and placed into the vault.

The vault has been shut off from view. Beside some bank personnel, the only people to have entered the vault after the theft were a few archaeologists. And what they saw made them suspicious. The thieves not only knew exactly where to drill to access the vault. The bank waited nearly two months to inform the antiquities department about the heist.

“When I saw the wooden chests ripped open, I started to feel dizzy,” said Nasser Abduljalil, who in April was appointed head of antiquities at the Greco-Roman city of Cyrene, around 110 miles northeast of Benghazi. “But what surprised me even more was that the bank had removed all of the other deposits beforehand” — while the artifacts remained behind, ripe for the taking.

El-Ketaf said the bank didn’t move the treasure because it didn’t have permission. The local Department of Antiquities office was never asked, and the head office in Tripoli was still under Qaddafi control. El-Ketaf added that the bank conducted its own inquiry and found that no one at the branch was connected.

To read the complete article, see: The Libyan Job: Insiders Used War to Steal Priceless Artifacts (www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/libyan-job/)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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