New York’s Met Museum to Return Looted Antiquities to Cambodia
- Milestone in international effort to repatriate stolen art
- Pieces in Met are ‘tied directly to illicit trafficking’
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art agreed with the Department of Justice to return more than a dozen antiquities to Cambodia, a major step in a decade-long investigation into the theft and trafficking of artifacts from the Southeast Asian country.
The pieces being returned “were tied directly to illicit trafficking,” Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement on Friday. In particular, all are connected to Douglas Latchford, a Bangkok-based British art dealer who the DOJ indicted in 2019 on fraud and conspiracy charges related to his sales of Cambodian works into Western collections.