Staff in Cahoots with Looters
Police and customs officers today raided four major museums across the country in the culmination of an operation that has been tracking down antiquities looted from palaces and temples in Thailand.
The operation involved senior gallery representatives who were easily able to gain access to collections around the world and were also familiar with the documentation required to repatriate foreign artefacts. It is believed that contacts working in the Thai heritage and culture industry had provided their foreign counterparts with a shopping list of the items that would be made available to them. This allowed the foreign looters to come pre-armed with forged documentation that had been tailored to the objects they intended to procure. The same documentation would later be used to justify the presence of the objects in museum collections and also to sell the looted antiquities to unsuspecting private collectors. Ultimately, though, it was intended that the artefacts would be sold at a premium to black market collectors. The forged documentation greatly understated the financial and cultural value of the artefacts. The prospective buyers, however, had agreed to pay the true value of the items. The artefacts were stowed away in the archives until the museum workers involved felt safe to sell them on. The falsified value was to be passed on to the museum as part of a legitimate sale, leaving a large excess from the pre-arranged prices to be shared among the looters. It is likely that the black market collectors were not merely buyers but that the operation had been run on their subscribed capital.