Veteran Curator Peter Higgs Alleged to Have Pilfered Priceless Artifacts from British Museum
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Famous curator Peter Higgs on August 17 was named in English dailies The Times and The Telegraph because the British Museum staffer fired final month within the wake of the invention that plenty of invaluable objects had gone lacking from the London establishment’s storeroom lately. Higgs, who had spent greater than three a long time working for the museum, is likely one of the world’s high authorities on historical Greek and Mediterranean artifacts and a member of the establishment’s “Monuments Males” staff, which traces looted antiquities with the purpose of repatriating them or placing them on show. He not too long ago curated the exhibition “Historical Greeks: Athletes, Warriors, and Heroes,” which opened on the British Museum in 2021 earlier than touring to venues in Australia and China.
Although he’s suspected of getting engaged in stealing from the museum way back to 2016, Higgs was fingered again in 2020, after an unnamed professional seen treasured objects on the market on eBay that gave the impression to be purloined and notified the museum. The establishment didn’t take motion till this yr, when a bit of Roman jewellery provided on the net public sale web site was traced again to considered one of its departments. Investigators discovered that the pseudonymous eBay account through which the piece was posted was related to a PayPal account that in flip linked to an X (previously Twitter) account bearing Higgs’s actual identify. Police are presently trying into the disappearance of things from the museum relationship to between 1500 BCE and the nineteenth century. Although a listing of the lacking objects has not been made public, many are stated to be of diminutive dimension, made variously of gold and incorporating semiprecious stones.
Higgs has to date not been charged with any crime, and has firmly proclaimed his innocence. His son Greg advised The Telegraph that the now-jobless curator is “devastated” and has “misplaced all religion within the museum.”
