News Releases and Statements
News Releases and Statements
HSI Dallas was able to locate the painting after receiving a tip from the HSI Attaché Office in Rome, Italy, in 2019. Based on that tip, HSI tracked the painting to a private art collector in the Dallas-area who had purchased the painting in 2015 from a dealer who was unaware that it was stolen.
Mohamad Yassin Alcharihi, 53, was named in an indictment that charges him with one count of entry of goods into the United States falsely classified as to quality and value.
Following an investigation by ICE’s HSI New York’s CPAA unit with assistance from U.S. CBP, Ashraf Omar Eldarir, a U.S. citizen, is being charged with smuggling Egyptian cultural property into the United States.
Pursuant to ongoing Cultural Property, Arts & Antiquities investigations by ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) New York, a civil complaint was filed Monday to forfeit a rare cuneiform tablet bearing a portion of the epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian epic poem considered one the world’s oldest works of literature.
The first item is an 11th Century sandstone Khmer statue torso of the Khleang style wearing a Khmer sampot, a traditional garment of Cambodia. The second item, dated between the early 10th to late 10th century, is a large gray sandstone Khmer statue torso of an unidentified deity.
Following a lengthy investigation by HSI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, and the Italian Carabinieri Command for Protection of Cultural Heritage, investigators determined that, sometime in or around 1875, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, Italy acquired a copy of the Columbus Letter-Plannck I, described above. At an unknown time between 1985 and 1988, the Columbus Letter-Plannck I was stolen from the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana.
The stone projectile points, used primarily for hunting, were unearthed by Harrie M. Wheeler, a noted Rhode Island collector and amateur archeologist, during excavations that he conducted between 1928 and 1950 in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.
In June 2019, HSI was contacted by the son of a former U.S. soldier who had legally purchased two Fernando Amorsolo paintings while stationed in the Philippines near the end of World War II.