ALR Tracking Stolen Iraqi Artifacts An insurer-supported service that helps carriers recover stolen art and artifacts is working to retrieve historic items looted recently from the Baghdad Museum during the Iraq war.

Even though the missing items are not insured, David Shillingford, marketing director for the Art Loss Register, located in New York, noted that insurance companies are indirectly playing an important role.

“We wouldn't be here if [insurers] didn't provide financial support,” he said.

Eighteen U.S. insurers support ALR through an annual fee based on fine art premiums, and a recovery fee for any art retrieved that insurers have paid claims on, he said.

Mr. Shillingford said that reports of thousands of artifacts being stolen from the Baghdad Museum are inaccurate. “You probably remember in the very early days there were rumors of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of items being looted from the Baghdad museum,” he said. “It has emerged that a number of items had been taken for safe keeping. It now seems that the total of items that may have been [stolen] from the museum is closer to 1,000 than the original numbers feared.”

The number of artifacts reported stolen has been “reduced significantly because items have been located,” he noted. He added that reports that stolen museum items were returned by citizens were also erroneous. “It appears that a lot of those were not items that came from the museum and are either fakes or just lumps of rock that people hoped to get a reward for turning in,” he said.

Experts in the museum community have been busy researching and confirming which items were, in fact, stolen, he said. Currently 26 of those items are registered on the ALR database, he said. The Interpol Web site lists 19 stolen items. Other organizations involved in recovering lost artifacts from Iraq are the Federal Bureau of Investigation and UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

“We've only just started putting the [stolen] items on our database,” he said. “There are bound to be more. The worst thing to do would be to just put any items up that might be missing because that would just confuse everyone.”

Mr. Shillingford said several items have been recovered from the Desert Storm conflict in 1991. One item recovered in 2002 by ALR is an Assyrian gypsum relief from the palace of Assurnasirpal II, which was at Nimrud in Mesopotamia, he said. The item, which at one time was in a museum, was excavated in the 1970s. The item has been seized and is being investigated in London.

Mr. Shillingford said the gypsum relief was discovered while it was being imported into the United Kingdom. “We were able to identify it as this item that had been in Iraq and should not have left Iraq,” he said. “If it's the piece we suspect it to be, it could be worth $1 million to $2 million.”

The Gulf War, he said, “is a slightly different situation because no one had access to Iraq,” so therefore, “no one had access to when [artifacts] left the country.”

ALR, he noted, has recovered numerous antiquities from various parts of the world that have been illegally excavated. But an item without a history is more difficult to investigate, he explained. “If something hasn't been seen for 6,000 years, it will not be on our database.”

Mr. Shillingford said he is confident that stolen items from the Iraq war will be recovered. “We've started registering items from this war and in the long term we'll have better access to information about what is missing than we did after the 1991 conflict,” he said. “These things will sooner or later surface.”

He added that the antiquities trade, which consists of museums, dealers and collectors, “does search extensively with us before they acquire items, so there is a good chance of recovering some of them. They would be unwise not to carry out a search with us, and most do.”

ALR also has been instrumental in locating items stolen and looted during World War II, and offers its services at no charge to holocaust survivors. It is estimated that from 75,000 to 300,000 World War II items are still at large, according to ALR. So far hundreds of items have been identified with the ALR database, which lists more than 100,000 stolen items (See NU, March 26, 2001.)

Research involves talking to art experts and searching through exhibition catalogues and photo archives. Within the past few years, several valuable paintings have been located in museum collections in the United States.

“The Art Institute of Chicago was the first, and somewhat of a test case, where a claim was made against a museum,” said Mr. Shillingford. The museum and heirs came to an agreement to display the art with a note about its history, and the heirs were compensated, he said. Other paintings were recovered from art museums in Seattle and North Carolina.

Until the database was begun in 1991, there was no unified source to locate stolen art, artifacts, antiques, jewelry or other unique items, ALR said. That meant that a painting stolen in the United States could be sold to an unsuspecting buyer somewhere else in the world. It also meant that the insurance industry had little help in the way of researching claims or uncovering fraud.

One recovery of note was made in September 1997, when ALR received a search request from a Florida dealer who was considering the purchase of a painting. An ALR database search resulted in a match with Edouard Manet's “Peaches” (1880), valued at $1.5 million, which had been registered with ALR soon after its theft in New York City in 1977. At the time of the theft, the work was co-insured by two U.S. insurers.

The FBI seized the painting and, after a lengthy investigation, it was released to the insurers, who sold it back to the family from whom the work was stolen.

ALR expanded its claims services in 2001 by forming an alliance with Insurance Services Office Inc., headquartered in Jersey City, N.J. ISO forwards information to ALR on claims for lost or stolen works of art, antiques and other valuables from its “ClaimSearch” systema database made up of 220 million records of property, liability and auto claims filed with insurers. The system checks for patterns of fraud in real time across lines of insurance and types of claims.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, June 2, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved. Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.

Special Reports /

ALR Tracking Stolen Iraqi Artifacts

Related Stories

Recommended For You