A search for thieves

Baghdad

The thieves worked at night, setting afire shreds of foam rubber to light their way through the blacked-out hallways and subterranean corridors of Iraq’s national museum.

They passed though an 8-inch-thick steel door, broke down a wooden door beyond, descended a staircase, negotiated labyrinthine passages and, using heavy tools, smashed through a cinderblock wall to arrive at a little-known storage room. Then they made for the room’s far northwest corner.

The burglars left hundreds of antiquities in the room untouched, it appears, finding interest only in the contents of 90 plastic boxes buried beneath others. The containers held thousands of small, ancient amulets, pendants and engraved cylinders once used by rulers and scribes to mark parchments. With gunfire outside still raging, they fled with the small artifacts and have not been seen since.

The number of items stolen during and after the war from one of the world’s premier collections of early-civilization antiquities appears now to be much smaller than first suspected. Thousands of pieces, however, are missing. Although many of the thefts are being attributed to looters, some appear almost certainly to be the work either of insiders or experts.

“In the most remote corner of the most remote building, they went after 90 boxes of the most easily transported items,” Marine Reserve Lt. Col. Matthew Bogdonos, who heads the investigation, said Thursday. “This theft ring had an intimate knowledge of the museum and its storage practices.”

The thieves might also have the knowledge to move such priceless pieces on the black market, experts fear.

Parts of the museum were ransacked after Baghdad began falling to coalition forces in early April, and staffers who had stayed to protect the collection -- said to contain 170,000 items -- finally fled.

Thieves and looters destroyed 17 display cases out of nearly 400 in the museum’s main galleries, damaging at least 22 major items and stealing at least 38, military officials now say. The most valuable and notable missing pieces include: the Sacred Vase of Warka, a Sumerian limestone bowl engraved with a depiction of the goddess In-nin, from 3000 BC; a life-size statue of King Entemena from the Sumerian city of Ur, dating to 2430 BC; and a marble head of a woman from Warka, from 3000 BC.

The items missing by the thousands appear to be relatively less valuable, smaller pieces -- many of them not on display but kept locked in the basement of the facility.

“Every piece is priceless,” said Muayad Said Damerji, senior advisor to Iraq’s Ministry of Culture. “The collection was as important to the world as to Iraqis. Many other collections have large gaps, and so they compare what they find to what we have here. You could tour the history of man from 12000 BC to modern times.”

Members of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, FBI, CIA and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies -- many of whom were sent to Iraq originally to search for weapons of mass destruction -- have set up shop alongside soldiers and museum workers to help document the losses and begin a worldwide search for missing pieces.

The task is daunting, in part, because of looting damage and the museum’s lack of a cohesive inventory (most records were handwritten). Investigators were initially shocked to see the Golden Harp of Ur in pieces. The harp could be restored, they soon realized, but its centerpiece -- the gold-encased head of a cow -- was missing. Then museum officials told them the missing head was a replica, and the real one was safe in a bank vault.

Bank vaults around the city hold many irreplaceable pieces, say museum officials, who stashed them as coalition troops pushed north. But many of the vaults are in the basement of the badly bombed Iraqi Central Bank in Baghdad. Investigators have not been able to reach the vaults, and no one seems to know which vaults hold the museum’s treasures anyway. Besides, the vault keys are missing -- as are the keys to the thick steel door breached by the well-studied thieves.

Museum employees also secured thousands of other items in vaults in the museum’s basement and locked facilities around the city. When electricity was restored at the museum this week, investigators were able to open those vaults and begin an inventory. Numerous other stashes have yet to be visited.

“To know what is missing we first have to know what was here,” said Bogdonos, the head of the team, who has a master’s degree in classical studies and works as a Manhattan homicide prosecutor. “But we have to start somewhere, so for now we are assuming that the things employees say are safe in a vault are indeed there.”

Some missing pieces are making their way back to the museum. Earlier this week, soldiers from the Free Iraqi Forces seized a steel suitcase containing 465 small items and returned it. Thanks to neighbors who say they took items for safekeeping, and to an amnesty program that allows do-gooders and looters alike to hand over items without fear of prosecution, more than 700 other pieces have been brought in.

Those include a 3,000-year-old statue of an Assyrian king and a 2,600-year-old vase. However, only about two dozen of the 700 pieces appear to be authentic, investigators say. The rest are replicas from the museum or collectibles shops.

U.S. tanks began rolling into the center of Baghdad on April 7. The museum employees left the next day. Most of the looting took place April 10-12, soldiers and neighbors say, and U.S. forces secured the museum on April 16.

Many Baghdadis have accused the Americans of doing little to stop the looting. “American tanks were right there,” an angry man shouted through the museum fence one recent day, pointing. “And over there, and there. Why didn’t they stop them?”

The answer is not clear, but for a time, as the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division rolled in, the museum was a battlefield. In apparent violation of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits attacking or fighting from protected areas such as museums, mosques and hospitals, the Iraqis built reinforced bunkers all across the museum grounds.

U.S. soldiers say they found rocket-propelled grenade caches on two museum rooftops, and at least two fighting positions inside buildings -- one of them in the adjacent Children’s Museum.

Kalashnikov rifle parts, a grenade, magazine carriers and other evidence suggest Iraqi soldiers fought from the buildings. A room in the Children’s Museum shows signs of bloodstains and has a massive hole in one wall, after a U.S. tank returned fire. The other fighting position was pierced by a 25-millimeter shell, apparently from a Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

“I don’t know what happened with the museum. I know there were looters,” said a soldier who was involved in the fight and now helps protect the grounds. “But we had a serious battle here.”

In addition to the statues, busts, pots and lyres, soldiers and investigators also found that nearly 40,000 ancient scrolls and manuscripts had vanished, almost all of the museum’s collection. A tipster pointed investigators to a bomb shelter in western Baghdad, where they found the papers, in 339 tin trunks, being protected by residents.

The residents declined to hand over the documents to museum officials, whom they accused of working with Hussein, but allowed Americans to inventory the lot and seal the shelter. Guards now protect the site, Bogdonos said, and residents have promised to turn over the cases to a new Iraqi government.

As suspicion grows that museum workers either carried out some of the thefts or helped plan them, museum officials have largely stopped granting interviews.

The employees and officials “are getting nervous,” said one investigator, adding that some had not seemed particularly helpful. Investigators, meanwhile, are questioning people on the street, visiting shops and bazaars and imploring border guards to be on the lookout. At the same time, they are trying to work closely with the people who know the museum best -- the workers -- even as the evidence seems to point in their direction.

“Nothing was touched in some areas, obvious things, except for a specific target,” said Dave Wachsmuth, one of the military’s investigators. “Someone had to have pretty good knowledge to make their way through this maze, in the dark, bring the right tools and hit these precise boxes. You may surmise that these people knew what they were doing.”