Priceless antique found buried in Baghdad backyard

By BRIAN WILLIAMS in Baghdad

The Sumerian Mona Lisa, a smudge on her cheek but otherwise untouched, has come home to the Baghdad Museum.

The 5000-year-old alabaster sculpture, which topped a list of 30 priceless antiques looted from the museum at the end of the war, is believed to be one of the earliest representations of the human face and dates from around 3500 BC.

To get back home she went through an ordeal no lady should have to endure, handed around in grubby back alleys and entombed for weeks in a Baghdad backyard.

Her saviours were a New York policeman and prosecutor, members of the 812 Military Police Company searching for the antiques.

"She's a little dirtier - who wouldn't be, after what she's been through - but otherwise in excellent condition," said Captain Vance Kohner, a reservist whose full-time job is as a prosecutor from Queens in New York.

Kohner and fellow New York policeman-turned-Iraq investigator Sergeant Emanuel Gonzalez spent months tracing the vanished lady through Baghdad's maze of streets and warrens.

The sculpture disappeared about April 9, the day US troops stormed into central Baghdad.

Iraq Culture Minister Mofeed al-Jazairi said the Sumerian Mona Lisa was the top remaining prize in the world's biggest antique-smuggling operation.

Authorities estimate more than 10,000 artefacts are still missing from the museum, and many will be lost forever, but about 3500 have been recovered. Some have been found in Britain, the US, Italy and Jordan.

The breakthrough in the hunt for the sculpture came on September 9 when a teenager walked into a local police station saying he knew someone who had information about the mask's whereabouts.

"The juvenile led us to an older man who then passed us on to a man who had the Mona Lisa buried in his backyard adjoining a farm," Koehner told a news conference at Baghdad Museum where the mask again went on display.

"We found her wrapped in an ordinary white cotton cloth buried under half a foot of earth in his backyard."

The investigators suspect the actual thieves could not find buyers for the statue because of the publicity.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq